Jaded as I am with commercial music and the industry in general (my indignation isn’t necessarily righteous or justified—I’m just continually upset at what gets on the radio and what the general populace seems to want), I have come to expect that “perfect pop songs” are to be found no more. Then I hear a little song like “Behind the Face” by Frames in Motion, a Seattle band fronted by multi-instrumentalist Jack Shriner, and I rethink my expectations.
Make no mistake, this is almost straight pop, though partially of the dream variety, with its soft vocals; the folk variety, with its non-traditional instrumentation (a bass harmonica, which sounds gorgeous and is completely essential here); and the slacker variety, with its trailing snare taps and nearly-buried cowbell. Riding on an arrangement of jangling guitar and playful bass, it’s beautifully played, sweetly sung, and feels fresh.
Shriner and his cohorts have delivered here a lovely ditty about nostalgia and the truths revealed in the analysis of memories. The familiarity one senses in the various parts of the recording dare the listener to analyze their own aural memories—there’s nostalgia in the music as well as the lyrics, but of a type harder to pin down: the song is familiar enough to feel like an old friend or a place you haven’t seen in years, but different enough to assure you that it’s not who or what you had thought. That’s how you know you’ve heard pop songwriting at its best.