Condo Fucks
Fuckbook
(Matador, 2009)

For a band that’s been around nigh on a quarter century, the fun of an album like this (given that it’s a righteous bunch of covers) rests somewhere in its being about as necessary as it isn’t. For those outside the loop, Condo Fucks is a sort of faux-mysterious one-off lark perpetrated by New Jersey indie pillars Yo La Tengo, “masquerading” as a newly resurgent lo-fi garage band of old. Through promotional channels, it has blossomed into a pretty elaborate joke, born out of the simpler one from the packaging of YLT’s immutable ’97 classic, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. The record sleeve of that album featured a sort of mock Matador catalog that had fun with silly-sounding fictitious band/album names while also poking fun at record labels’ practice of actually placing such ads for real. The catalog included albums such as the Electric Tie Rack’s Anyone for Paisley?, the Shitheels’ Bucketfull of Shit, and of course, Condo Fucks’ would-be seminal LP, Movin’ In, summarized as “Punk rock smashingly paraded as only New London’s bad boys can.” Twelve years later, the gag lives on, this time in actual album form, yet it’s more fun than funny-ha-ha, more fist-pump than wink-and-nudge. The premise and backstory as told in deadpan press materials and a YouTube video are worth a chuckle, yes, but the album is just plain unpolished rock, basically for rock’s sake, and there’s nothing all that hoax-y or fake about it, really.

In 1990, YLT released an album of mostly folk covers called Fakebook, which is a term for a loose pile of scantily notated sheet music that a good reader of music could use to quickly learn the basics of given songs. In 2009 comes the Condo Fucks album of ’60s and ’70s garage covers called Fuckbook, the meaning of which you can decide for yourself, though it’s clearly a play off the earlier title. Yo La Tengo is beloved for their two-and-a-half decades-worth of contemplative, well-hewn, alternately shaken and stirred indie rock, equally cerebral in its perfect placid moments as it is in gusts of squawking, fuzzed-out overdrive. It makes sense that they’d guile it up for this raucous, transitory slopfest to shake free of their grown-up reputation for a few songs, enjoy a smidge of distance from their otherwise very deliberate material, and make it easier to forget the calm, cool, and collected Kaplan in the interest of setting free crazy ol’ Kid Condo, amp-kickin’ rocker that he is. Playing up the promotional mythology gag, Matador states that this recorded Condo Fucks rehearsal session is being released to drum up excitement for a forthcoming CF comeback tour of sorts. The reality, if one cares to know, is that Ira Kaplan occasionally lends his piano skills to an actual, little-known Brooklyn garage/blues band called the A-Bones, which, one year ago, was playing the going-out-of-business show of local Brooklyn watering hole the Magnetic Field, shutting its doors after less than six years in business. The A-Bones needed an opening band, Ira roped in Georgia and James, they threw together a bunch of appropriately garage-y covers, recorded it because they thought it sounded good, played that one live show, and that was it. Singer/guitarist Ira Kaplan was indeed the ringleader in the birth of this fandango, donning the full-on Condo Fuck alias of Kid Condo, whereas Yo La drummer Georgia appears as the less committal Georgia Condo, and bassist James McNew delves wackily incognito as… well, James McNew. (Come on, Dump. Where’s the spirit?) The point is that this is not the indie rock Chris Gaines, Hannah Montana, or even Sasha Fierce. Just a hot bunch of garage covers by a band with a healthy sense of humor and more energy than one might expect.

As for the music itself, it’s good and fully rockin’ lo-fi fun. Fun to hear; it certainly sounds fun to play. We know Yo La has always enjoyed mucking around with cover songs, and on some level, there’s gotta be at least some slight twinge of brute, upper-classman joy in showing doe-eyed labelmate crunch-kids like Times New Viking that the oldsters still know best. Their take on the first part of the Beach Boys’ “Shut Down” could have been the happiest moment at a Velvet Underground show, while their reverent rendition of the Electric Eels’ “Accident” faithfully juices nearly every timeless bit of proverbial octane up from the skin-tight, bratty original. If, indeed, the album runs in the same order as their Magnetic Field set list, the Condo Fucks certainly know how to bring a house down, opening and closing with full-throttle versions of the Small Faces’ “What’cha Gonna Do About It” and event-appropriate “Gudbuy T’Jane” by Slade, respectively. As an album, Fuckbook is a side note at best, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. With the economy the way it is (and this whole thing did start with a business going under), people are going to be drinking cheaper beer and washing their own cars this summer, and Fuckbook is exactly the kind of album that’ll make you feel pretty good about both.

Watch: “Condo Fucks – Straight Outta Connecticut” [at youtube.com]