This is Medium Rotation, a newsletter about the bands we used to play on my college radio station, 88.3 WSBU-FM, St. Bonaventure. Today, we’re looking back at Missouri indie-pop band Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, who are still together.
It’s always something. A violent attention-grabber like Cut Off Your Hands, or a woodland evocation like The Antlers and Grizzly Bear, or something impossible to google like Girls. For Will Knauer, it was a drive to the mall with his mom as a teenager that led him to think up the name of the band he’d soon start up. “There was a story about Boris Yeltsin on NPR and I just thought, ‘Someone still loves you, Boris Yeltsin,’” he said to Stay Thirsty in 2006. “I told the other guys and they were like, ‘Whatever.’”
With friends Philip Dickey and John Robert Cardwell and eventually Jonathan James, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin spent the mid-aughts writing the kind of indie pop that stuck like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth. Hooky but not showy, imbued with the soft grace of Belle and Sebastian and Elliott Smith, their self-produced debut, Broom, radiated the homemade warmth of its recording spaces inside Knauer’s attic and living room in Springfield, Missouri. Yet their Midwestern roots prevented them from taking too much credit even as the buzz rolled in. “Recording at home doesn’t cost you any money and you can do it as many times as you need to get it right. Of course, we weren’t worried about sound quality because we didn’t think anyone was going to like it anyway,” Knauer said in 2006. Dickey followed suit: “We write pretty simple songs because we’re all pretty mediocre musicians.”
You can decide if you agree (Pitchfork certainly did), but I think that’s subterfuge.
There’s an extraordinary quality about the synergy distilled by Dickey and Cardwell, who traded off vocals until the latter left the band in 2013. On Broom, their voices sound so similar that it’s nearly impossible to tell what’s a double-tracked harmony and what’s another body in the room. You can bask in the warm ramshackle glow of “Oregon Girl,” which made it onto The O.C., in hopes of spotting the vocal separations and you’ll quickly ditch the game to listen for fun. There’s much fun to be had. “Pangea” begins the album with a geography metaphor and quickly becomes an indelible lesson in lost love. And there are enough emo echoes haunting the back half (“Anna Lee,” “Gwyneth”) to make the collection feel like a lost lo-fi masterpiece on first listen — which I’m pretty sure is precisely what happened to propel the band around the blog circuit.
I’m a few years too young to really understand the power a buzzy act really had online in the mid-2000s. But from what I gather, the process often went like this: Band (often twee) posts a handful of songs (often demos) to Myspace, then gets written up on a blog, then starts accumulating interest by bigger publications (often via blurbs in Spin, Rolling Stone, and the like). Then they come to New York City and play Mercury Lounge or Union Hall and it’s a huge deal that people can talk about after (often in a celebratory, slightly wistful “remember when” kind of tone).
When Broom’s charmingly rough edges landed it a re-release on Polyvinyl in 2005, SSLYBY were primed to go bigger, so they did. By 2008’s Pershing, the band traced over its own pencil-thin outline in Bic. The melodic onslaught of “Glue Girls” once caused me to tweet how SSLYBY were in league with Paul McCartney, an outrageous claim, but I was on a Megabus at the time, and tweeting outrageous claims is one good way to spend captive time. I have very fond memories of the watery guitar tone on “Modern Mystery” soundtracking winding drives through New York’s Southern Tier on Interstate 86. At times, Pershing feels like a prog-pop record that didn’t go prog enough; “Oceanographer” hits like Andy Partridge vamping for time after penning one-quarter of “Senses Working Overtime.” But then “HEERS” feels like a sonic resume for SSLYBY at large, with Dickey and Cardwell as intoxicatingly in sync as the song’s galloping bassline and handclaps. When the whole thing swells to a carousel finish, they sound like a buzz band capitalizing on its own buzz.
WSBU was also The Buzz. And SSLYBY were a revelation. Our music directors booked them for an April 2010 show, a few months before they unleashed their third and most confident LP yet, Let It Sway, and I spent the weeks leading up to it learning every lyric on Broom and Pershing and posting some of them as Facebook statuses to indicate that I was #deep. (“Send a wire, write a letter, let me know if you’re there and if you’re heart’s still thumpin’.”) When the four members of the band showed up in our dingy underground campus bar for the gig, it felt like seeing superstars. Never mind that we had Ra Ra Riot the previous year. This was SSLYBY, switching instruments mid-set and stomping fuzz pedals to gild their lily-white studio recordings with specks of grit. When they were thoroughly sweaty after the power chords of “All Hail Dracula!” and “I Am Warm + Powerful,” they brought it home with “Pangea” before crashing at some radio staffers’ on-campus townhouse. They watched a Cardinals game, took a shower, and knocked out.
Then came Let It Sway, which has the distinction of opening with two of the best songs they ever wrote. “Back in the Saddle” momentarily transforms SSLYBY into pure arena rock, which feels both unstable and exhilarating, like a toddler taking its first steps. That’s an insanely reductive analogy, but listen to “Yr Broom” and this one back to back and you’ll understand it might actually be an understated comparison. That prog-pop thing? They master it here and infuse just the right amount of big-throated stadium cheese to give it wings. Then, to remind you of who they are, they follow it up with “Sink/Let It Sway,” the platonic ideal of a SSLYBY song — jangly, ripe for college radio, and boasting a handclap coda as large as a Saturn return. We played the hell out of it.
It’s the kind of song you’d expect to be big on streaming, and thanks to Spotify’s latest upgrade, I can report that its play count sits just north of 722,000 hits. Because we live in the age of the secret Spotify hit, though — see Nate Rogers’ excellent piece on how Pavement b-side “Harness Your Hopes” has earned 20 million more plays than “Cut Your Hair” — SSLYBY can count a few playlist-ready tunes as their most-streamed. “Young Presidents,” from 2013’s Fly By Wire, boasts 3.7 million, a sonic presence ripe for what one might call indie vibes, and an easy-vowel chorus lead-in with a colorful synth line. Plus it actually dropped in the Spotify era. Rediscovered early gem “Let’s Get Tired” sits at nearly 3 million from its perch high on Should’ve Been A Sleeper Soundtrack Hit Mountain. “We got bored so we’d do drugs when waiting for things [to] happen now” is a great line about young-person ennui (speaking of Pavement) and casts the song as a mopier “Polar Opposites” — the shit you need to hear when a cigarette in a deck chair out back starts to lose its novelty. Meanwhile, “House Fire”’s 1.8 million plays absolutely dwarf the paltry 182,000 for catchier song “Glue Girls.” I don’t understand this system.
In the years since Cardwell departed amicably, Knauer, Dickey, and James have continued releasing SSLYBY material and even fuzzed things up considerably on their speedball fifth album, 2015’s The High Country. They now occupy an enviable space in the modern music landscape: enough name recognition and smart social posting to follow their own release schedule and not feel the pressure to play the game that younger bands have to contend with. There’s also the fact that people fucking love this band. They are warm and powerful. Maybe they’ll make another album.
In the meantime, Dickey has spent the past few years playing with wiggly synthpop side project Dragon Inn 3 and funky and brassy group Miss Boating, plus being a dad, and jamming with his neighbors. Knauer teamed up with Diane Coffee, Aloha, and Yumi Zouma for the Polyvinyl Exquisite Corpse comp last year. SSLYBY lives on, shouting out their friends and the bands they dig on Twitter, including ones from a younger generation who came up listening to Broom and Pershing and Let It Sway and Tape Club and Fly By Wire and The High Country.
Their impact is quantifiable. Their hooks tend to stick around and burrow like little moles in the dirt. They even made it onto NPR, just like their namesake Russian president. It’s always something.
ABOVE VIDEO: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin perform “Modern Mystery” at The Rathskeller at St. Bonaventure University on April 18, 2010. Major thanks to Danny Bush for filming it and preserving it.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
The band name likely opened way more doors than it closed, but there’s always a cognitive dissonance when a band with a goofy name writes some outwardly earnest songs that deserve to be taken a touch more seriously than their moniker might allow for.
Yes, they’ve played Russia, including a Moscow gig mere weeks after Yeltsin himself died and in the man’s hometown for a festival.
Despite coming up during the indie-shrug years, they really do give a shit about writing good songs. Take this gem from a chat with Dickey in 2010: “The biggest thing pushing us forward is that we want to make a classic pop record that’s really satisfying. I think if you write a real deep hook, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter where you recorded it, who produced it, how polished it sounds, and how many overdubs you recorded. … I think we’re all extremely moody people, but we prefer to write about the good times instead of the bad.”
UNTIL NEXT TIME: They could muscle up when they had to, but SSLYBY has always thrived in quieter, more intimate spaces. Here’s a 2008 clip of them performing in what looks like a band room at a high school radio station (!) in Pendleton Heights, Missouri.