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Revealingly, many of my idiosyncratic historico-personal favorite bands share vocal duties between the genders, The Sugarcubes, Frente!, The Fiery Furnaces, even The Velvet Underground with Nico and Naomi’s few front-and-center appearances for Galaxie 500. The one Hit Space most reminds me of, however, is Australian jangle-popmeisters The Hummingbirds, the great Australian band unfortunately mostly unknown here. They share the too-close-to-the-microphone production (which works substantially more effectively for The Hummingbirds but regrettably sounds kind of amateurish here) and exuberant strumming characteristic of jangle pop as well as the straightforward rhythms and seemingly (although of course not really) obvious melodies and dirty boy-girl back-and-forth. On that last score Hit Space’s Carrie Clark is unfortunately no match for The Hummingbirds’ Alannah Russack; compare Clark on track two, “Can’t Get It Right” and Simon Holmes’ apostrophe to Russack on “Get On Down” from 1990’s loveBUZZ: “Don’t let yourself go on and on / to please me, please don’t use a line / we’ll save some time” versus “I’ve heard exaggerated rumors / about you using cocaine / and all of the men that you like / get access to your domain.” Clark’s well-intentioned heart just isn’t in the dirty girl drama; vocally, she’s like that earnestly endeavoring girl who thinks you’re just great, really nice, who really and truly likes you and wants to give you a blowjob, but just cannot bear to let the head of that dick touch the back of that throat. When she sings “You’ll never know what happened last fall” on track four, “Trash,” you can’t help but wonder if you’d really be that shocked, more “My Boyfriend’s Back” than Courtney Love.
I know I sound like a nattering nabob, but because this is such well-trod territory that can’t be the full story. Hit Space is essentially a fully competent genre band (a quality neatly summed up both by the band name and the ciphericality of this EP’s title; Hit Space is a band with a dream [you can guess the dream from their name] but not really a vision) playing in a genre of which I am inordinately fond. If you like pure pop music like this as much as I do, if the phrase “easy on the ears” is in the right context a highest-type compliment, my criticisms are almost beside the point. To a certain extent, the individuality of the performance is beside the point. If AustinSound had not provided it, I would buy the album ($5.99 on CD Baby); I would pay up to $10 for the show, and probably six to eight shots while I was there; I wouldn’t pay for a shirt, but then again I haven’t bought a concert tee since Dokken ca. 1989. Two out of three is pretty good.
Anyways. Hit Space fares best when the the other half of the vocal duo Joel Ossar (he really does sound incredibly like The Hummingbirds’ Holmes) enters the spotlight. He does his best imitation of Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle’s famous whisper-sing intros on track five, “I’ve Got Time”: “I’ve still got my looks / I’ve got half a mind / being impatient / takes up all my time / I’ll take my chances / with being unkind.” Then, a single strummed and re-strummed chord and banging snare and then Clark, now backing Ossar, crescendo in, and the effect is most excellent. Toward the end of the track, he delivers the best lines on the album: “It’s been a long time / I still get my share / of long loving looks / and thousand-yard stares.” Even Clark, much as I’ve dissed her, often sounds great, especially when she’s harmonizing with Ossar, as on the chorus to track three, “The Paranoids”: “And don’t even ask for sympathy / I’m no one’s enemy / I’ll be down / It’s not even worth the worrying / I’m not sorry this / turned around.” The observation that follows even achieves a notable poignancy: “Sometime’s living’s a / full-time hobby / it’s never ending / there’s no easy way / to be happy.”
In some ways this isn’t much of a review, and I’m sorry about that, but like most things Hit Space is, in its context and subjected to analysis, complexly alive. The six tracks on (Verb) come in at 17:31.
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