“Vacationing People” – Foreign Born
At once ambling and deceptively precise, “Vacationing People” has the satisfying pop complexity of a late-era Beatles song, without being otherwise Beatlesque in any obvious way (though come to think of it, singer Matt Popieluch has a buzzy voice that can sometimes bring George Harrison to mind). While the song does have verses and a chorus, it also employs a repeating bridge, which results—unusually—in the bridge getting more air time than the somewhat elusive verses do. This kind of thing is subtle but effective: structural intricacy, when there still is structure (versus complete free-formedness), gives a pop song an ineffable sort of richness that charms the ears.
And what I think I like best here is how the song makes a hook out of something that is not inherently hooky. And let’s see if I can explain that. I’m talking about the chorus, which we hear the first time at 1:06. It’s a sort of call and response, with Popieluch singing a simple melody that meanders, ascendingly, around a shuffly beat that is surely influenced by one sort of world music or another (the press material says benga, which is from Kenya, but I don’t know enough to corroborate that); the answering vocals offer the same four-note response each time, three of the notes simply repeating before closing with one whole-step descent. The fuzzed-up bass and some tinkling guitar lines mesh with the shifty rhythms and the whole thing far exceeds the sum of its parts, forging a hook out of not one particular thing you can point to. By the second time it comes around, it sounds like an old friend.
Foreign Born is a quartet from Los Angeles. “Vacationing People” is a song from the band’s debut CD, Person to Person, scheduled for a June release on Secretly Canadian. MP3 via Secretly Canadian.
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