The Gin Blossoms are getting back together, maybe. Seemingly insurmountable impediments to the blandly anticipated reunion include the suicide of founding member Doug Hopkins and the involvement of several surviving band members in other projects.
This has not stopped their label, A&M Records, from releasing a greatest hits compilation album gleaned from the meager pool of past work which consists of two albums, an EP and several soundtrack singles.
“Outside Looking In: The Best of the Gin Blossoms” may seem to be just an excuse to capitalize on the cheap repackaging of the same tired tunes, but the album is a good mix of Gin Blossoms hits and lesser known songs. It provides a decent introduction for would-be fans, features two non-album cuts and proves to be a balanced mix for long time enthusiasts who are too lazy or law-abiding to record their own “favorites” cassette.
The album begins with two of the band’s best known songs, “Follow you Down,” the only semi-hit from 1996‘s “Congratulations I’m Sorry,” and “Hey, Jealousy,” from 1992’s “New Miserable Experience.” The latter still enjoys rotational airtime on alternative stations, even here in Bakersfield.
Unlike contemporary alternative bands such as Foo Fighters, Lit and Blink 182, whose songs suffer from sound-alike-itis, the Gin Blossoms were never afraid to experiment with unexpected musical forms and styles. Few Arizona-based bands have attempted the admittedly limited appeal of a Cajun love lament. The inclusion of “Cajun Song,” and the uncharacteristically high energy “Day Job” on an album of otherwise conventional selections, prevents a listener from lapsing into complacency.
The Gin Blossoms are at their best when performing REM-inspired, alternative folk-rock hybrids. Their more popular and accessible songs are heavy on guitar and harmoniously layered vocals that provide a pleasant contraposition to their grumpily irreverent and misogynistic lyrics.
Vocalist Robin Wilson’s lack of the requisite huskiness clashes occasionally with the late Hopkins’s iconoclastic lyrics. In “Pieces of the Night,” a melancholy disaffirmation of the band’s bar-drenched nightlife, he observes “It’s lacking something big this time/What the hell did you expect to find?/Aphrodite on a barstool by your side?” In retrospect, a suicide’s song lyrics are inevitably cryptic and heart rending: “You wanted to be where you are/But it looked much better from afar/A hillside in shadow between the people and the stars.”
In the band’s ill-advised attempts at ballads like “Not only Numb” and “As Long As It Matters,” Wilson’s castrato-like warbling alarmingly aligns them with such perpetrators of “wussy rock” as Savage Garden or the deservedly defunct Air Supply. Their much-touted collaboration with critically revered East Coast icon, Marshall Crenshaw, “’Til I Hear It From You,” turns out to be a harmlessly generic and tepid sock-hoppy song taken from the soundtrack of “Empire Records.” The only other non-album cut is a live but polished version of “Whitewash.” You’d never know it wasn’t the album cut if it weren’t for the scattered applause at the end of the song.
The band’s greatest triumph is “Found Out About You,” a gorgeously jangling anthem to adolescent male insecurity and burgeoning sexual obsession. “Street lights blink on through the car window/I get the time too often on A.M. Radio/ You know its all I think about/I write your name, drive past your house/Your boyfriend’s over, I watch your lights go out.” The combination of familiarly eerie lyrics and Wilson’s softly sexy vocals chills the spine while making you want to scratch someone, in a good way.
The Gin Blossoms formed in 1987 in Tempe, Arizona, and despite the early tragedy of Hopkins’s suicide and incessant band member attrition, enjoyed ten years of local and national popularity and critical acclaim.
The band surprised their loyal local fan base by staging a performance in Phoenix this past New Year’s Eve. Rumors of a reunion have been circulating ever since. Whether or not the opportunity to see the band live again proves to be reality or wishful drinking, “On The Outside Looking In” provides a pretty good excuse to give some pretty good songs a second listen. If they do get back together and record a new album, the re-emergence of their essentially reissued work may serve to root out a few new fans.
Perhaps Hopkins inadvertently best summed up his own posthumous review when he wrote, “If you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.” A greatest hits album from a disbanded band with a small catalog is exactly what you should expect, not much, but not bad.
Runner@csubak.edu