Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1966 and Brian Wilson is sitting on a picnic table overlooking the Pacific. And it’s overcast. He has his notebook out, and is writing what could be considered history’s greatest love song. Or rather, he just started. The page is blank, except for the opening line: “I may not always love you.” Suddenly, in this alternate universe, a good stiff breeze pummels the packs of cumuluses, the sun breaks out and offers up a shaft of light on his notebook and shaky, drug reaching hands. Such a fantastic sharp contrast appears on the pitted and repeatedly red-stained table that he cannot help but take a moment to look down at the grain and pick at it with his pencil. The lead breaks and, suddenly, Mr. Wilson realizes he is without a writing instrument. He looks back at the notebook. “I may not always love you.” He chuckles and looks up. The clouds are making haste towards a lunch-break, and the surf and the sea and the sand look amazing. “I will always love the ocean,” he says to himself, stands up and walks towards it, then a gait, then a run. Right into the water. “I love this feeling. This is so good. Everything is beautiful in the ocean, from every pebble of sand to every fish to the vibration of the wale’s call. It’s all good.”

Mr. Wilson returns to the table, to his notebook, and tosses it into the back of his car. He drives back to the studio and writes, just a few years early, “Good Vibrations.” It takes “God Only Knows” place on Pet Sounds, and the latter is lost forever to the ether of space/time or whatever that crap is on Lost that lets them make alternative reality stories like this so plausible.

For us, “God only Knows” isn’t just our favorite pop song of all time, it’s also a turning point. Though they were already touring with Warhol’s The Exploding Plastic Inevitable multi-media project, it would be another year before The Velvet Underground and Nico darkened pop music with its door. Revolver had yet to be recorded, Rubber Soul having just been rushed to market to beat Christmas. Though there are no doubt exceptionss that someone will call us out on, the mantra of popular music up until this point had been decidedly Pie in the Sky.

Sure, there were songs of loss and heartbreak, and even heartache – but nothing this devastating. Nothing this dark. We don’t consider this the Dairy of it’s time by any means (the emo record that launched a thousand ships), more a product of the culture, politics and magnitude of that moment; a ship channel into which other artists were similarly dipping their paddles.

Pop music wouldn’t quite be the same after this. The box had been opened, and suddenly tones and themes and ideas that had little or nothing to do with surfing, cars and great balls of fire would become not just pedestrian, but fundamental to the art form. The innocent swagger of “I Get Around” would give way to the oversexualized cynicism of “Sex in the Club.” Even when pop seems its most innocent, its sprightly naive best, it cannot go back and take the other fork in the road that “God Only Knows” picked for all of us. How else could the beaming youth and feel good twee-pomp of Belle and Sebastian, for example, be matched with lyrics so disturbing, so antithetical to the melodies and arrangement?

Every now and then, though, we come across a set of recordings that we think from that other time, that other place where “God Only Knows” was set aside for a romp in the salt waters. Songs that, try as they might, cannot fool us into thinking that we still inhabit a world were the work of NWA was not merely inspired, but necessary. Microscopic Metronomes is one of those records. From the opening moments, with the band singing together around the sounds of a crackling campfire, it does double-time in shimmer, sway and smiles. Jangling its way through track after track of indie guitar pop as carefree as a sunbeam, the arrangements are clever enough to keep you interested, but with the comfort of artful (not artsy), simple melodies you feel like should have been invented before. Metronomes does not challenge you. It does not call you to muster up your intellect to trace the roots between Chicago techno and postminimalism, or demand you put some effort into figuring out the place in your praeternature that is supposed to respond to what you are hearing. It does not bore you with songs of woe intended for an already overstocked cupboard. It just pleases.  It just entertains.  It wraps is arms around you and says “Hey.  Kiss me real quick before we go into the ocean.”

There is a danger here, we think, of confounding our reaction to this record with the idea that it somehow lacks depth, that it is not weighty enough to reach into the coal closer to the truth of our being. That it’s a lightweight, some sort of musical Old School, pure mindless entertainment.  This is incorrect. We are all multifaceted, and often not our better selves. Before we were black and bitter, used up and not particularly interested, there was a light within us. And we credit the Moccasins for approaching their art from that place, as so few do anymore. For regular readers of this site, it should come as no surprise that we enjoy this, as we have enjoyed their performances, earlier recording and company. We have to say, though, even we were a little taken aback at how this record took us back. Joyfully Recommended.

You can catch the Wild Moccasins at their CD release show tonight, January 23rd with Buxton and Teenage Kicks at Walter’s.  A copy of the CD is included with your admission, as is tons of other stuff.  Complete details here.  All Ages, doors at 8.