Centro-Matic ” A Parade of Choosers”
My senior year of high school was spent mostly taking long drives around the South Bay of Los Angeles in my friend Mike’s 1996 AstroVan. The soundtrack was made up of mostly Weezer’s “Pinkerton” & Guided by Voices’ “Bee Thousand”. We knew every lyric to every song on both of those albums, and had convinced ourselves that musical nirvana was singing along at the top of our lungs with the windows open speeding down long stretches of the Pacific Coast Highway.
So when we stumbled upon Centro-Matic’s Redo the Stacks it all made sense. Big overblown melodies just like Weezer all recorded on what sounded like a boom-box, á la GBV. It was the merging of everything we wanted, an album full of melodic guitar pop that sounded like it was pasted together on late nights of heavy drinking with friends.
Ten years later I still to come back to it, and it still all makes just as much sense. “Parade of Choosers” is a song that begs to ask the question: “Do we need more than some melodies, a couple loud guitars, some beer, and a 4-track?”. It makes me believe we don’t. Listening to this album, and particularly this song, makes me think maybe it really is that simple.
