Abbey Normal

Every now and again when you've driven up to Provo, Utah to meet your fiance's father for the first time—and after the three of you have had a blast snowboarding for the better part of the night—you'll find yourself traveling up to Salt Lake City to catch a rock show. You're into music; your fiance is into music; your fiance's father is into music. Why not, right?

Well on that day, you will undoubtedly enter a smoky bar and find three kids playing something resembling ska-punk. Not ska-punk in the Operation Ivy vein, mind you, but the type of ska-punk that would be full-fledged third wave ska if they could only find a horn section. But, of course, the thing is, they can't. And they never will. So they've resigned themselves to sounding like Saves the Day with upstrokes.

And if you were to place bets on he future of this band, the smart money's on continuing to play these types of bars, maybe some high school functions, vehemently urging their friends to come see them, and then eventually dissolving. Not breaking up, mind you. Eventually they will all just stop showing up to practice. No one will bother to call, they'll all simply move on. It would be a shame if not for the fact that the band isn't very good. Sure, they know how to play their instruments. They even have some catchy songs. I'm sure a close circle of 20-30 peers and admirers will wonder whatever happened to that band. “Good times,” they'll say. But notice they never quite say, “Good band.”

Well here's a coincidence to end all coincidences: I saw this very band! They're from Provo, they were playing at a bar in Salt Lake City, and their name is Abby Normal.

If you're over the age of twenty, you'll probably recognize the Young Frankenstein reference. These kids were in all likeliness under the age of twenty, so this reference probably seems a great deal more obscure to their age cohort than it would to ours. So, obscure but comedic cultural reference for a band name...check!

The singer wasn't very good at singing. He could stay on key when he sang loudly. Unfortunately, he lacked the confidence to sing loudly during the softer parts of the songs. But if you know anything about my musical tastes, you'll understand the kind of leeway I give to singers. You'll also recognize my favor for the emotional content that underlies the musical content. It's more abstract, more difficult to summarize, but ultimately much more rewarding.

And this band, Abbey Normal, in spite of their shortcomings, had that completely intangible and subjective emotional content. Peeking out from behind their lack of confidence was the very reason for this lack: they really wanted people to like them. They took themselves seriously in a way too few bands do these days. I don't mean to say that too few bands take themselves seriously—that is anything but the case—they just take themselves the wrong kind of seriously. They either want to put out an album or they want scene cred or they want to be famous. They want to feel important. Like rockstars.

Abbey Normal, on the other hand, simply wanted people to enjoy their music. They wanted to get on stage and play music that was fun to listen to. And, in spite of their seeming newness to the stage, that feeling came through. It's the type of feeling that even the most seasoned vets can't pull off. It screams of a time when intentions were simpler, before the information age had polluted the vast horizon of possibility, back when a song was sung because someone wanted it sung and, goddammit, that was what they were going to do. I'm not entirely sure that time ever existed, save for in the minds of those who would will it so. Nostalgia is all too often a revision of history, a retroactive ennoblement of the profane.

But the purpose of music is to give texture to these revisions, these fantasies. It provides a platform for the eradication of our fears and, in its place, the installation of hope. And damned if that wasn't exactly what Abbey Normal was doing that winter night in a small bar in Salt Lake City. In a strange and strangely profound way, they instilled my bitter and jaded mind with a jigsawed sliver of hope. Now, when the music industry crumbles in the most vivid versions of my fantasies, it'll be bands like Abbey Normal that look around, shrug, and play a few upstrokes.