Port O’Brien’s “All We Could Do Was Sing” turned me back into a 16-year-old holding a copy of Weezer’s “Pinkerton.” I can’t be a hipster about it;
I can’t feed you a bunch of hyped-up bullshit. I’m just entirely embracing it as the best album of the year with fervent, off-putting love.
I’ve heard these songs live more than I’ve heard any band play any songs live. A tape of the band playing these tunes at KCPR last year is almost permanently wedged in my car’s cassette deck. On top of that, the band members are my friends, people I run into at coffee shops and slug Keystone Light with at house shows. The songs still don’t fade like the blog era demands for music we’ve listened to only a handful of times. The album captures exactly what made this band so pulling for me for the last two years: lyrical quality mixed with raucous, booze-soaked, full-band cohesion. These songs are parts of a long-term lover, breasts and thighs I’ve known that still undeniably excite me.
The focus of the album defines post-college emotions better than any in recent memory have. The lyrics draw from principal songwriter Van Pierszalowski’s time spent commercial fishing with his father in Alaska. During this time, he spent a few months unable to communicate with his life, band and love. It builds on the cliché of “doing what you have to do versus what you want to do” with full emotional honesty and the deepest of nuance. The songs draw on personalized temporary estrangement, providing a universal template that the separated can’t help but lay their emotions upon,
Yes, it’s anthemic. But like the best anthemic albums, its power builds upon details thrown off-handedly outside of the chorus. “Close the Lid” jams along into loud swelling moments, but captures the sentiments of the whole album somewhere deep in a verse when Pierszalowski sings, “Like the way your heart always returns / After I have left it unconcerned.” He encapsulates the nuance of the specific relationship that is at the same time so openly described as part of the universal human experience. The points are caught and delivered on so well, so continuously. In “Stuck on a Boat,” he shouts, “But my feet weren’t made for the sea / They were made for running free” in a manner so openly autobiographical yet anthemically pulling.
The album’s release comes at the end of my three years of entrenchment in the San Luis Obispo music scene, and it feels like a culmination, an orgasm rising out of what at times feels like the senseless pounding of a few people. While Port O’Brien has no one to thank but themselves, it’s gratifying to know an album that came from this town with these record shops, these coffeehouses, and this college radio station. It can sit between Pavement’s “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” and Belle and Sebastian’s “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” but its locality overrides the importance of even those albums by validating this town’s music scene.
Boo Boo Records, Pocket Productions and KCPR will be celebrating the release of this album on Tuesday from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Anyone who comes in and buys the album at Boo Boo’s gets free merchandise and a free ticket to the show on May 22 at Retrospect in San Luis Obispo.
Graham Culbertson is a journalism senior and a stacks director for KCPR, San Luis Obispo, 91.3 FM. He’s also completely full of it.