PrettyFakes

This Polaroid is of the photographer and living legend COURTNIE WOLFGANG. I put her name in all-caps because that’s in the rider her band has. If you want the FOLK YOUS to play your town, you better get ready to pony up some decent whiskey and typographical love. And ditch the irony.

For a couple years now, the Folk Yous have been serenading ATHENS with their lovely acoustic reinterpretations of rock and roll classics. It’s predominantly the catalog of any “classic rock” station, or the cassette-strewn backseat of a ‘77 Chevy Nova: Journey, Van Halen, Asia, Tom Petty, Night Ranger, Def Leppard—if you ever danced in front of a mirror to it, they play it.

I say play it—but really there’s a hefty dose of re-and-deconstruction. Strip away Mutt Lange’s neoSpector thirty-foot drums and distorted back-up vocals from “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and you’re left with the bizarre, creepy nonlyrics: You got the peaches, I got the cream, sweet to taste, saccharine. Filtered through gentle harmonies and delicate picking, then slowed down a couple beats, the song loses its macho stripper come-on and becomes almost psychedelic, the worst attempt at erotic poetry ever by a tenth grader.

Still, it holds up. You realize there’s a killer melody there, even amidst the dreck. The best Folk Yous songs do this, dismantle the layer cake production and ease the numbness of billions of listens from ages 15-33. John Francis Bongiovi, Jr., and his bandmates secretly made intricately crafted and desperate music, which is hard to forget from all the staring at ripped bluejeans and explodo graphics. Listen to this super-lo-fi Folk Yous runthrough of “Living on a Prayer,” and realize that the song really was an attempt to writing a modern “Born to Run”:

Sadly, my sources close to the band have informed me that recent changes in geography may have an impact on ongoing band performances (unless there is now an Ohio-Georgia megatube connection). HAVE WE SEEN THE LAST OF THE FOLK YOUS?!

Download: Folk Yous – “Heat of the Moment” (Asia cover—Live at the Caledonia Jan. 11, 2008).

Tags: athens, big gray, folk yous, polaroid

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Gorjus, Polaroids, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.