Now That's What I Call Music!

06/26/2001 8:00 PM, LAUNCH
Lyndsey Parker

"There's probably five singles in the top 40 right now that are talking about exactly what we're talking about in 'The Liar's Club,' but from the opposite angle," laughs Christiaan Webb, one half of the self-explanatorily named duo the Webb Brothers, as he reclines on a balcony at Hollywood's Roosevelt hotel with his other half, brother Justin. Segueing into an impromptu mock-rap in a resonant thug voice not unlike Tone Loc's, he continues, "To have a top 10 record now, you have to be like, 'I'm goin' to the club, drinkin' champagne, I'm gonna get the girl, yo, pullin' up in my Benz,'" before lapsing back into his mild, measured manner of speaking and sighing, "It's like, the whole culture that I find so meaningless you almost have to fully embrace, and buy into that sort of conformity. I mean, what a lame aspiration: 'I wanna be the guy that's on the guest list!'"

"The Liar's Club," named in (dis)honor of a notorious scenester hangout in the Webbs' home base of Chicago, is the opening track on the brothers' stupendous sophomore effort Maroon, setting a grim, gritty tone with its decidedly less-than-glamorous depiction of urban nightlife. Inspired by the bros' personal winter of discontent--a dead-end downward spiral that lasted two squandered years, during which they were living fast and on their way to leaving behind a couple of good-looking corpses--"The Liar's Club" depicts a sad and shallow club scene far removed from the Cristal-chugging, booty-shaking good life of "Jumpin', Jumpin'" or "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It." With such brutally honest, bottomed-out lyrics as "We're getting older, but we like to think we're young/And when the lights are low, I look as if I'm 21" and "We forget each other's names, but that don't matter much to us/There's always someone new to meet and someone else to love," it's clear this is one club where they wouldn't really want to be members.

Other opuses on Maroon--which has precious little in common with the album of the same title by one-joke ponies Barenaked Ladies, thank you very much--won't exactly qualify as summer 2001's answer to "Who Let The Dogs Out?" either. The cautionary coke tales "All The Cocaine In The World" (an unsettling, anesthetized mantra of "All the cocaine in the world...won't bring back the girl") and "Powder Pale" (a profoundly personal and traumatic eyewitness account of a young girl's overdose, with baroque backup that sounds like a silent movie theater orchestra's accompaniment to a spooky lost-saucer flick) could scare listeners straight in ways that Nancy Reagan and D.A.R.E. could never accomplish. The jaded, starkly depressing one-night stand chronicle "Fluorescent Lights" ("At 3 in the morning I'm ugly, but handsome to you/In fluorescent lights this charade would be through") could inspire the horniest and most promiscuous of listeners to take a vow of celibacy. Even the album-closer "Sleep If You Can," a dull ache of a Disney lullaby, is more Disney-esque in a psyche-scarring, death-of-Bambi's-mother kind of way, and is about as likely to induce peaceful slumbers as the pricey Colombian powder about which the Webbs' sing so harrowingly.

So, if the songs currently clogging the top 40 are carefree kegger anthems, then Maroon's tracks are the songs playing after last call, when the bar shuts down, the buzz wears off, and the hangover starts to kick in. These songs comprise the soundtrack to a midlife crisis that's somehow arrived about two decades too early--that aimless, hopeless cycle of life when, as the track "Marooned" describes, "you think you're going places, but it's only in your mind." Come on, now: Were the Webb Brothers' party-hearty Windy City days all that awful?

"Honestly, at the time, if things hadn't started to happen for us and our music, there was not too much to be hopeful about," Christiaan, a dead ringer for Donny Osmond circa '78 (or at least one of the secret illegitimate Osmonds), admits with a wan smile, his expressive baby-seal eyes unblinking.

"When we went out there, we sort of made a decision to take night jobs instead of day jobs. I think that that was probably the number one decision that affected our lives," recalls Justin with a wry grin and a flop of his moptop. "We started going out, and all of our social life took place after work--and we got out of work at like, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning. We didn't have a lot of money at that moment in our lives, so we were living in the same room, and we were working in a really dark, dingy bar and staying up partying and drinking and doing 'bad things' all night, and then sleeping all day. At first, it was fun; we could pretend that everything was fantastic. But after a couple years of it, you start realizing, 'Wow, I'm getting older, and this party is never-ending...'"

But don't think Maroon is mere music to slit one's wrists by. The Webbs are hardly self-pitying, slack-jawed sad-sacks, as evidenced by their Sid & Marty Krofft-worthy graphics and videos, their shambolic live shows (more on those later), their liberal spikes of pitch-black humor, and--most of all--their buoyant, bombastic pop melodies. So slap Maroon into the stereo at a party--or even at the Liar's Club--and instead of crying despondently into their beers, everyone in the room will be oddly energized by singles like the skewed singalong "Summer People" and lost-love blockbuster "I Can't Believe You're Gone." It's a crafty, clever, magnificently subversive dichotomy of dark/light and happy/sad that turns every track into a stomach-flipping, heart-breaking, three-minute emotional rollercoaster; not since the Buzzcocks' Singles Going Steady or Sebadoh's Bakesale has bittersweet pop sounded so rotten-radish bitter and so sugar-shocking sweet. If Brian Wilson once described the songs of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds as "teenage symphonies to God," then Maroon's mini-rock operettas are twentysomething symphonies to the Porcelain God. Or, to namecheck yet another (if lesser) rock 'n' roll vet, in the words of John Cougar, this music hurts so good.

"We always sort of got off on mixing pop melodies with really dark lyrics," confesses Justin. "Really dark lyrics with happy melodies, or really dark melodies with happy words--like in 'Are You Happy Now?' we're singing, 'Happy, happy, all smiles,' but the song is just so sad! Sort of playing with people's emotions in that way seemed like a natural thing."

"It's good for the subject matter, too--wanting to peel away at that idea of late-night life, like an onion," adds Christiaan. "Like, there are so many layers to peel away, and then when you get to the center, it's like, 'Wow, this is really smelly!' That's how our music is: You're listening to it and it's happy, and you're partying and you get into it, and at first it seems like so much fun. Then after a while, it catches up with you."

However, it takes repeated listens to get beyond the instant gratification of the Webbs' progressive powerpop and finally take notice of the dark lining beneath the music's seemingly silver cloud. And some casual listeners--the same ones who mistake the Cardigans' "Lovefool," R.E.M.'s "The One I Love," and the Police's "Every Breath You Take" for innocent little ditties and, ironically, dedicate these "love songs" to their significant others--may never notice. Sadly, those simpletons are missing out on a whole other level of appreciation for the Webb Brothers' music, but Christiaan simply shrugs and says, "That shows how unimportant, in the modern scheme of things, lyrics are--how people only listen to the tune."

"Tunes don't even seem like they're important anymore!" Justin interjects incredulously. "Melodies aren't important, lyrics aren't important...all that's important is the fashion of the way a record sounds: How 'fashionable' does it sound? Does it sound 'now'?"

None too thrilled with the current state of rock music himself, Christiaan solemnly concurs: "There's very few songs out now that are going to be on karaoke machines in 20 years," he muses. "I don't think Limp Bizkit is going to work for karaoke."

The Webb Brothers' music, however, has real staying power--so a couple decades from now, tone-deaf revelers may well be belting out "The Liar's Club" and "All The Cocaine In The World" at the local karaoke hut (even if they don't pay much attention to the meaning behind the words they're warbling). One thing's certain: Justin and Christiaan plan on sticking around for a good long time. "We've always thought of our careers as being like bands like Wilco, or the Flaming Lips--the survivors," Justin stresses. "They're survivors because each record's better than their last. They're always growing. As long as you're writing better songs than you were writing before, and it's honest, then your career will continue to grow. If you're building an organic career, all those fans, you're not going to lose them--unless you let them down. Then they'll be like, 'Oh! How could you do that?' Like, if we came out on the next record wearing yellow jumpsuits with things tied to our heads, we would lose the fans that we've got. 'Cause they'd go, 'You guys let us down. You guys are fake!'"

Now that Webbs have released their first "proper" U.S. album (their indie debut, 1999's Beyond The Biosphere, was a leftfield smash in the U.K.), they'll continue to build their career organically via nonstop touring (sans yellow jumpsuits, of course). "This is the sort of record you have to get on the road with, and win people over with live," acknowledges Christiaan, whose adenoidal, Springsteenian rasp perfect complements Justin's cheddar-sharp, tangy-twangy Costello-isms, melding into one raggedly passionate voice onstage in a way that only blood brothers' harmonies can. "This is a record that has to get on a lot of people's radar; people have to live with it. We need to go out and play."

But once again, it must be stressed that these sibs don't take themselves too seriously, and that certainly applies to their joyously loopy live performances: When the Webbs hit the stage, they really are happy, happy, all smiles. "We got to the point where had a big, slick, perfect rock show, and then we were like, 'This is no fun!'" chuckles Christiaan. "Now the band's starting to really get good live, because we got the show to that slick point, and then we threw it all out the window. We didn't care about that anymore. We were looking for something else."

"If you go out and play a perfect show every night, and it's real slick and rehearsed and everything's the same, then people are gonna realize that they're not getting something special," expounds Justin. "We try to keep that relationship with the audience, rather than put on some super-slick show, so they know they're getting a unique moment. It's a really sarcastic show, there's a lot of humor in it, lots of over-the-top metal antics. Obviously, we're not a metal band, but we're just such goofballs."

"And when people don't get it, I think it's even funnier!" Christiaan snorts with mischievous glee. "Like when people go to our show and are like, 'God, what posers!'"

"'That was so cheesy, man--you threw the double-metal sign and then jumped off the drum riser!'" Justin plays along, imitating a confused concertgoer who doesn't quite grasp the Webbs' live schtick. "We're like, 'What are you talking about? That was f--king awesome!' It's just about keeping it fun: We're sloppy, we talk to the audience in ways that we shouldn't, we make noise...you get the vibe that we're playing in the garage."

"It's about, are you trying to reach people through a purely pop level, or are you trying to reach them through emotions?" Christiaan says. "Live, we rock out and stuff, but we try to have moments during the shows that are intimate, like, 'Hey, we're right here. We're right with you.'"

With their road-warrior work ethic, Christiaan and Justin--who now employ a third Webb progeny, baby brother James, on keyboards--are forced to spend extensive stretches of time together on tour, but they've thankfully managed to side-step the sibling-rivalry rock clichés of the famously feuding Davies, Gallagher, and Robinson brothers. "It does us no good to not get along, because eventually we're gonna to be on a red-eye flight somewhere and we're just going to despise each other for those two hours," Christiaan rationalizes, attributing the Webbs' brotherly bond to their Rockwellian upbringing. "It just has to do with the vibe of our family. Justin and I have had our difficulties as adults, but as kids, we had a wonderful childhood: Our parents were still together, and our mom raised us to be close. We've always stuck together, we're close with all our brothers and sisters, and we try to look after everybody."

The Webbs' most renowned relative is father Jimmy, the legendary songsmith who's penned all-time pop classics performed by everyone from Bing Crosby to David Crosby. That's a mighty lofty legacy to live up to ("There's a higher expectation on your work from the get-go; you could put out the same record and if your dad wasn't Jimmy Webb, there'd be a different expectation than there is for us," Christiaan concedes), but so far, Justin and Christiaan are making dear old Dad proud--it's clear they haven't just inherited his wide-eyed good looks but his sophisticated songcrafting skills as well, and now they're establishing a solid showbiz rep of their own. "Our dad is generally known as a songwriter, while we're generally known as a loud rock band," Justin points out. Adds Christiaan, "And a lot of people who are getting into us don't even know much about our dad!"

Still, constant comparisons between the chips and the old block can be tiring for the Webb sons. "One thing that's annoying to me is the extended sentence that begins 60 percent of the articles about us," gripes Justin, "where it says, 'Sons of songwriter Jimmy Webb,' and then in brackets, 'who wrote "Wichita Lineman," "By The Time I Get To Phoenix"...'"

"It's almost like those songs are his children, too--and they're more important than us!" Christiaan gasps. But he and his brother needn't worry. If the emotional pop wallop packed by Maroon is any indication of the Webbs' future greatness, they will no doubt enjoy their own long and important career--one that'll take them from the Liar's Club to karaoke jukeboxes around the globe in about 20 years' time.