The Roches - Nurds
#417
by Paul Zickler
October 15 1980
The Roches
Nurds
Genre: Music From Somewhere Else
Allen’s Rating: 2 out of 5
Paul’s Rating: 4
Highlights:
Boat Family
The Death of Suzzy Roche
This Feminine Position
I resisted joining choir in high school. I thought choral music was stupid and uncool. Why take real music and arrange it in four part harmony for 40 people to sing? I used to walk by the choir room and sing lines from Little Richard songs at the top of my voice. Why Little Richard? I don’t remember. Anyway, I ended up joining choir my junior year and loving it, more or less. I never got completely comfortable with choral arrangements of pop songs, but it was fun being part of a group of people who liked to sing, and the field trips were a blast.
The Roches obviously started out as choir kids, but they were the ones who, while singing the hell out of everything, probably gave the side-eye to most of the other kids, and maybe even scared them. They were three sisters from New Jersey with voices simultaneously angelic and goofy. They wrote songs simultaneously poignant and annoying. They fit no genre imaginable. Three part harmonies telling stories about growing up as weirdos, having crushes on musicians, changing clothes several times before going out at night. Acoustic guitars, clarinet solos, yelping. What does one do with this music in the context of everything else that was happening in 1980? And yet…
Here are the lyrics to “Boat Family” in their entirety: “I am a little piece of chocolate, expensive and mean. No nutritional values have I. You may have me. Once in a while, I will make you smile. You are a fifty pound bag of soybeans, more than a bargain to me. You take hours to cook. You have serious taste. You make me sob. I am a poison and I am fun, illegal lightweight luxury. You are the law, the long hard road; grave, inevitable destiny. This is the story of the boat family. Came over here from the Red China Sea. Moved into the sovereign state of Suffern. When they got their picture taken they were laughing.” Is it poetry? Is it a goof? It might be about feeling socially inadequate and making the best of it, or it might be about stuff in a boat. I don’t know. It's unsettling in a kitschy way. Does that even make sense?
Paul Simon loved The Roches. Loudon Wainwright III had a daughter with Suzzy. There is a song on this album told from the perspective of a woman who goes to the same laundromat as Suzzy Roche, resents her cocky attitude, fantasizes about killing her. The song is called “The Death of Suzzy Roche.” It has a delightful, lilting melody, sort of Manhattan Transfer-ish. Laurie Anderson apparently hung out with the Roche sisters. This does not surprise me.
Listening to all the “novelty” songs (I hate that term, but it conveys the idea), I was wondering what it might sound like if they just played it straight. The answer comes in “Factory Girl,” a traditional Irish ballad. The answer is meh. It’s OK, but it kinda made me miss the goofy stuff, which is disconcerting. Why would I miss songs like “One Season,” with lyrics like “Set down your key and trumpet / Go have a dream and hump it?” What are you doing to my mind, Roches?
The last track on the album is called “This Feminine Position.” Musically, it feels like what might happen if the Indigo Girls kicked Mark Knopfler out of Dire Straits. Lyrically, it’s both silly and brilliant, using double-edged puns to meditate on pregnancy and its effect on a relationship. “We can talk about the menu / We can talk about the cause / We can talk about the other women you’ve des(s)erted / With your sweet and sour sauce.” This is music from another time, another place, possibly another planet, or at the very least, a parallel dimension. I’ve never been there, but it was a pleasantly disorienting experience to visit for 37 minutes.
https://open.spotify.com/album/4K5YQqKuzLAPsfAGzdIKnK?si=WyRK5zyUQrSuuvcO1EkxqA
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