Supergrass

w/the Coral

Thurs March 20, Showbox, doors at 8 pm, $14 adv/$17 dos.

I must admit I never paid much attention to Supergrass until their latest album, Life on Other Planets. Sure, I'd heard their first single, "Caught by the Fuzz," back in the mid-'90s, and I liked it--a pumped-up, punky pop song with an infectious melodic sense and enough edge to put it over the top. But Brit pop sort of ran together for me (I was going to say blurred... no pun intended), and there were a lot of "Super" groups at the time: Super Furry Animals, Superchunk, Superdrag, Superconductor, Super Deluxe, Supersnazz, Superstar, to name a few. The list was mind-numbing and a little cringe-inducing, like beauty salons with names like Hair Apparent or Mane Attraction.

So I didn't pay that much attention, which put me in league with most of the American listening public who didn't take to Supergrass like they did to Blur and Radiohead. While Radiohead went on to be sainted as epic art-rockers and Damon Albarn of Blur pushed his band in a more experimental direction and then became a cartoon for Gorillaz, Supergrass continued perfecting their chops in their original vein.

As Supergrass finally start to come into their own with a big buzz behind them (they were sainted a "national treasure" by England's NME), the band is happy to give props to the acts that give them a kick. "A few years back, a journalist gave me a live bootleg of the Rolling Stones' 1972 tour for Exile on Main Street," says Gaz Coombes, Supergrass' lead singer and guitarist. "We listen to that before we go on [stage], and it gets us pumped up. It's amazing--they were at the top of their game then." He sounds like an unbridled, geeky fan.

I'm not surprised he loves the Stones, nor would I be surprized if he loved the Buzzcocks, Small Faces, or T. Rex. Supergrass are a compendium of British music from the '70s. That's not to say they are derivative, but neither are they wholly original--it's more that nostalgia isn't what it used to be. And that's a good thing. They are pastiche artists dipping into a well of influences and reconstituting something for their own purposes, which can be startlingly good at times.

On Life on Other Planets, the Oxford quartet expand their songbook and style with an ease and verve that's been lacking on their last two albums. The band seems happier with the results: "The new songs lend themselves to being played live very easily," Coombes says, "and they blend in with other songs in the set." On the opening song, "Za," Coombes sounds like Marc Bolan's scruffier twin, singing "Get it on!" over T. Rex guitar licks. Supergrass use classic rock elements and hooks as inspiration now rather than imitation. There are echoes of Mott the Hoople, the Kinks, and glam-glitterati Bowie in their work.

"At home, writing a song on piano, it's just my song. The conception of the songs is quite magical, and I'm not thinking of influences or being influenced by anything," he says of the writing process for Planets. "In the studio is where we find the right sounds to fill that out. That's when I'll think of sounds I have loved on other records, like a guitar sound or a drum fill."

For Planets, the band holed up in the south of France and fleshed out material, then returned to England to record with producer Tony Hoffer. It was the first time they had worked with an outside producer since their first album. "He had a great track record working with Air and Beck," Coombes says. "It helped to have outside ears, someone who could step away and get the whole picture." Hoffer's influence can be gleaned by the small sound effects (birds chirping, sheep bleating) and sonic textures (treated guitar solos and squishy analog effects) that give some of the songs an offbeat feel, as if the Soft Boys had been arranged by Van Dyke Parks. "[Hoffer] adds something," Coombes says, "but we still sound like ourselves."