New rock from the old blue

By Alec Bemis

COURTESY I-HUEI GO

Cover art from Geek Love's new 7".

College rock. What an odd duck. The success of underwhelming, former college boogie rock acts like Hootie and the Dave Matthews Band has given people the wrong idea of what college rock stands for. What happened to naiveté? What happened to learning to play your instruments sometime after your first show? What happened to putting out a record before coming out with a t-shirt or a marketing plan? Yeah, Yale has plenty of funk bands providing the extended soundtrack to drunken near hook-ups at frat parties everywhere. But if you look a bit farther, you will find that this campus also manages to squeeze out some new rock blood every year--bands that do shows at Yale with the intent of forming songs, not just cool bass licks.

Mia Doi Todd, BR'97, went home to Los Angeles over winter break with a recently pressed, self-released 7" and came back to the east coast a newly-minted, full-length recording artist. While home on break, Todd wracked up a few well-received gigs at L.A.'s Jabberjaw club--a kind of West Coast version of New York's CBGBs. Thanks to those performances, the recording label X-Mas asked her to put out a CD for them. X-Mas, while hardly competition for DGC and the like, is a well-respected indie label that has released records by Further and Sebadoh. Todd's record of starry eyed, chanteuse-like solo musings--featuring backup by Nothing Painted Blue's frontman Franklin Bruno--will be out in the spring.

Jason Morphew, TC '95, has also recently recorded a full-length CD debut. Combining an earnest love of rock-n-roll and old-style country with the eccentricities of songwriters as diverse as Hasil Adkins and Leonard Cohen, Morphew garnered fans not only at Yale but in local bars during his traipse through New Haven ivy. After a stint working behind the counter at a Captain Video in California and many months on the road, he has recently settled in New York. Morphew continues to play out as much as possible, and has his record slated for release by another small, but critically well-received label, BaDaBing!

Which brings us to Geek Love, the most recent entrant into the 1997 Yale record-release schedule. Assembling the collective talents of Josh Beaton, CC '97, I-Huei Go, CC '97, Jess Row, TC '97, and Greg Zinman, BR '96, Geek Love are celebrating the release of their first 7" on their own Swivel Arm label with a show in the Calhoun Cabaret at 8 p.m. on Sat., Jan. 25. The Floorpilers, their compatriots in rock, will help them celebrate. Geek Love's record strives for the easy release of perfect pop; appropriately, it holds two songs falling just around the perfect pop song length of three minutes, thirty seconds. "Ariadne" and "Cost" both underplay some of the guitar fuzz the band shows off in the live setting in favor of catchy lead guitar, warm, understated vox, and shambling pop songwriting. In the song "Cost," Go sings of "giving into guilty pleasures" and this is just what this record is--a nice light break from your daily slate of organic chemistry and Greek epic poetry. It is like the pinch of ginger before and after the sushi or some similarly abysmal metaphor.

Best of all, you too can be part of the magic by getting your hands on all of these recordings through the performers and their labels. For information on the recordings mentioned: Mia Doi Todd singles are $3 to PO Box 205807, New Haven, CT 06520; information on Jason Morphew's record can be had by e-mailing BaDaBing! at BaDaBing@aol.com; Geek Love can be reached by calling I-Huei Go and Jess Row at 624-6879. And remember, rock hard old blue, rock hard.

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