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By 1996, every band with a guitar felt the pressure to crank its amps as loud as possible, and even indie pop fans heard the clean jangle of prior years give way to the distorted crunch and Psychocandy worship of bands like Black Tambourine and Henry’s Dress. Those making more bookish and insular styles of the genre, like the Magnetic Fields and Belle and Sebastian, weren’t being worshipped as critical darlings; in some cases their records hadn’t made it to America yet. Rocketship’s 1996 debut, A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness, then, sits at the crossroads, marking a transition between the raucous, exuberant indie pop of its moment and the more tender, literary form the genre would soon take. For its 30th anniversary this month, the album has received a simple reissue: no B-sides, demos, or liner notes, just a remaster that sounds approximately 15 percent sharper. Its songs still feel timeless, none more than all-timer opener “I Love You Like the Way that I Used to Do.”
Rocketship’s founder, David Reske, was a California kid who spent many of his formative years in Texas. By the time he made it back to San Francisco for college, he’d already fallen in and out of love with shoegaze and wanted to start a band. Inspired by the chirping keyboards of Martin Duffy-era Felt, Stereolab’s ability to mint ’90s cool from ’60s kitsch, and Unrest’s endless tremolo variations, Reske sold his guitar pedals and bought an old Hammond M2 organ, recruiting keyboardist Heidi Barney and bassist Verna Brock to play and harmonize with him. The organ is the defining sound of early Rocketship, effectively becoming their distortion and noise machine. It is smeared everywhere on their debut 7″, the charming Hey Hey Girl, and its title track epitomizes their style: Choppy, catchy treble guitar riffs meet fuzzy organ melodies as Reske sings, casually and sweetly, about a cool kid who’s all alone. Had they broken up after that record, Rocketship would be remembered kindly as the deepest of mixtape cuts and as a profound inspiration on the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Instead, Reske and co. got started on an album, for which they nicked the title of a record by Astrud Gilberto and Walter Wanderley, drawn to the older album’s abundance of organ and romantic melodrama.
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A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness is a breakup album, or at least it’s about coming to terms with being unable to be with one’s beloved. “I Love You Like the Way That I Used to Do” is indie pop’s “Roadrunner,” a freight train of delirious emotion so flawless it threatens to overshadow the record. A perfect two-chord riff collides into the brightest, loudest organ churn, before the two helix together and break the cloud cover, stacking and layering to My Bloody Valentine heights. It’s dizzying and overwhelming in the best way, like so much young love. It captures the paradox at the core of the album: the all-important pursuit of love versus the increasingly bad choices it encourages. “The sun shines brighter every day I’m without you/But I love, love, love you like the way that I used to do,” Reske yelps along with Barney and Brock, stuttering and fumbling his words like Roger Daltrey did on “My Generation,” and making this sound impossibly sweet.
Deske did not fear vulnerability, and his narrator spends the rest of the album oscillating between twee romanticism and latent codependency, looking for love everywhere he shouldn’t. “Kisses are precious so please don’t be selfish/By giving your love but living apart from me,” he pleads on “Kisses Are Always Promises,” supremely aware that a new flame might already be planning on breaking his heart. “I’m Lost Without You Here” is rambunctious and lovingly saccharine, its “do-do-do-do-doo”s both a desperate plea for a lover’s attention and the nervous tic of an anxious partner. By the time the album reaches its finale, “Friendship and Love,” Deske sounds a note of acceptance, bemoaning the twin losses that occur when someone fully steps out of your life. The organ that colored all the earlier tales of youthful exuberance now plays a funeral dirge.
Losing relationships did seem to deprive the band of its strongest muses. Not long after the release of A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness, Reske took over the project and set aside guitar pop to explore the droney, fuzz-filled ambient music that had occasionally filled interludes between tracks. Rocketship wouldn’t return to their original sound until 2006’s Here Comes… Rocketship, and by then the spark of young love had faded, replaced by production experimentation and characteristic eccentricity. Reske appears uninterested in fetishizing or recreating his past, and that’s probably for the best. It is a little heartbreaking that an artist who found such beauty in doe-eyed, sentimental pop songs doesn’t want to make any more of them, though if ever there were a lesson to take from A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness, it’s that it’s better to have loved and lost.
