The 12 Best Songs by Seattle Band Throw Me the Statue

Throw Me the Statue’s most well-known song is a great example of
what the band does best: It’s immediately a pop song, its melodies and
arrangements (heavy on strummed acoustic guitar and rolling,
hand-clap-happy backbeats) inviting and catchy, but it’s also slightly
obscure. Those arrangements are deceptively crafted, from the first
drum-machine pattern to the final hectic chorus; its subject isn’t so
much an object of infatuation (a girl) as it is the feeling of
infatuation itself (“the hunger”); and songwriter Scott Reitherman’s
best lyrics are just slightly off (“I wanna make you lose your brain,”
“I got the bullets in my head/And she asks me why I came,” “She was
19/And we all rearrange,” the lonely, unlikely chorus “Every night I
pray/She comes around my house to stay”).

Critical hyperbole aside, no song is perfect, and the small
imperfection in “Lolita” is its opening couplet: “Lolita/I gotta see
ya.” The rhyme just rolls off as so easy, so pat, the literary
reference just a little too freshman year. The next line, “I got a
fire/When she pulls me in” adapts Nabokov’s text directly (first
sentence: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins”), and a
colleague has suggested that there’s something fun and playful about
the casualness of the first couplet contrasted with the second’s more
literal borrowing, about the way singer/guitarist Reitherman is sort of
conversing with the book. I only mention the obstacle of that first
line because it highlights how nearly flawless the song is as a whole.
The clincher is the moment just after the three-minute mark, where the
song doubles back on itself, folding into one last chorus with vocals
and drums and glockenspiel all echoing and tumbling over each other as
the song rushes toward its too-soon end. You find yourself skipping
back to the start of the song to hear it again. EG

Out of an electronic organ drone comes a sneaky melody, pinned down
by a forceful beat. The beat takes hold of you, the way Paul Simon’s
“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” is all beat—a horizontal,
stretching-toward-the-distance feeling, like it would be really good to
listen to while driving between fields of crops, the rows of green
stuff making rippling patterns. It’s a road-trip song. The chorus goes:
“Puuuuuuuuuull me in. Puuuuuuuuuuuull me in.” The other weekend I was
driving home from Portland with a couple passengers, and we listened to
Creaturesque, and everyone kept saying, “Who is this?” and “I
love them,” and I kept saying, “They’re a pop band. They live in the
Central District. I love them, too.” It seemed like the best song ever
written coming through the speakers of a car going 80 miles per hour.
According to an interview with Reitherman, the lyrics are about the
long drive between his hometown in California and the affluent
peninsula suburb where he went to high school, a drive sometimes
accompanied by one of many “sweet but oblivious suburban girls.” The
song begins with a hint of deception (“Annie, does your boyfriend
know?”), a bit of affectionate knowingness (“You seek a habit and a
small feeling of danger”), and some bitching about the sorts of shit
you find on the radio when you have the misfortune of being on a
highway in California (“If that’s a DJ, I’m the pilgrim Mona Lisa”). It
was an easy song to write lyrics to, Reitherman says, akin to
freestyling some scattered ideas on top of a beat. Throw Me the
Statue’s first two albums are riddled with excellent slow songs, but
this is the king of them all. It pulls you into its tight, mysterious
velocity, and then it vanishes in a long tail, cometlike. CF

“Lolita” may be the most popular track from Throw Me the Statue’s
first album (and therefore their most popular, period), but I always
thought this ought to have been the band’s breakout single. It’s got a
lot of the same (signature) elements—acoustic guitar, softly
rocking backbeat, Reitherman’s flat yet tuneful voice, affectless and
charming, lyrics simultaneously vivid and vague (“Favorite space is a
palindrome/Where I tuck in a cannonball/And I never have to share/And
where nobody can see”). But it’s also got some slightly Spanish guitar
at the start, a little subdued trumpet toward the middle, and a funny
answering-machine recording played out over the coda. Not to mention
“About to Walk” has the better chorus, just as lonely and odd (“Strange
nights locked inside/I was waiting for a road ahead”), and leaping up
and out from the musical bed of the track, all soaring echo and
strained highs. EG

The electric-guitar riff that starts this song—the riffiest
riff on this album, and maybe in all of Throw Me the Statue’s
catalog—sounds slightly sinister in tone but bounces with such
energy that you ignore it and just bop right into the verse, which
takes you to a warm and gusty rooftop dusk at SXSW: “Austin breeze/You
pack some punch/We were having such flagrant fun.” It’s all bright,
open guitar chords, strummed so as to sound each note in cascading
sequence, and calm vocals, both drifting off over a lightly buzzing
bass line. Then: “You blew straight through my heart/As my phone lit
up.” On first listen, it sounds like it could be a love song, the phone
lighting up like fireworks (“You blew straight through my heart!”), but
it’s not. It is, according to Reitherman, about good times interrupted
by the bad news that your best friend’s dad has died. Still, even with
such a sad subject matter, Throw Me the Statue can’t help but write a
sweetly sticking (if, as always, slightly askew) pop song. The lyrics
delve further into the awkwardness of feeling empathy for a loved one’s
loss while at the same time feeling self-conscious about how you can’t
really feel what they feel, while at the same time again feeling
their loss largely in terms of what you stand inevitably to lose
yourself—but the song just keeps ambling along, almost oblivious,
poppy as anything. EG

You know the alleys of Capitol Hill east of 15th Avenue? The ones
that run between the backyards of well-off families? These are all
houses that, when you look at them from the front, have nothing to say
to you, but when you ride your bike through the alleys behind them,
you’re overwhelmed by information: the money on display, the cars rich
people own, the way they keep their garages, the bright crap their kids
have, the big leaves of old trees growing in their backyards. This is a
quiet song about the people who did well for themselves, the kids who
conquered—although only vaguely, because half of the words you
can’t make out. How are the people who excelled so much in school
faring now? Are they happy with their spouses and the children they
made, or are they at least not unhappy? If you take an interest in the
lyrics, you discover it’s a song about going west, about pioneers,
about the loneliness a city can inspire. Whatever. It’s one of those
songs that you’re never not in the mood to listen to, that seems to add
meaning and depth and context to whatever you’re looking at, but riding
your bike through that part of the city, with all those big and not
needy houses, in the shadow of St. Joseph Church and the radio towers,
is especially perfect: The song sounds like contentedness. Throw Me the
Statue live just a short ride south, where they’re practicing their own
kind of conquering. CF

The first song on the first album, “Young Sensualists” is a fine
introduction to the band’s sound and some of Reitherman’s common
lyrical themes (friendship, romance, and the strains that one can put
on the other). The song reads like a journal, a travelogue, just edited
down to sometimes rhyme: Two friends land in a foreign city, take
everything in, indulge their senses in the safely exotic, fall in love,
and fight. In the background of the picturesque postcard is a chugging,
chintzy drum-machine rhythm, a muted but ear-worming guitar melody,
some soft humming synths, and small flourishes that sound like
synthetic and heavily reverbed steel drums but which are probably just
smartly treated guitars. Reitherman’s voice is typically impassive but
his lyrics are plenty expressive, centering on the final, telling,
almost apologetic line, “You were an honest pal/And I wasn’t always
right somehow.” EG

“I know your noises,” goes this song’s central lyric, delivered in a
kind of inscrutable plea, and even though the lyric only means one
specific thing, I like to hear it two ways: first (and this is the
reading supported and solidified by the whole chorus), as a familiarity
with the reckless talk of someone who falls in love too often and too
carelessly (“I know you’re always in love/You talk [a lot? about? him
up?]/You can’t afford what you take”). Secondly, though, I like to hear
“I know your noises,” the first, sighing line of the chorus, as being
about knowing a lover so intimately as to recognize the little noises
they make, those that others’ ears don’t get to hear. That chorus plays
out over big, round guitar chords and crystalline keyboard trills that
hang in the air, refracting light like a fine mist. Elsewhere, that
guitar is bolstered by steadily plinking piano keys; throughout,
everything is anchored to a clockwork-tight drumbeat. Another great
line from this song, and one that illustrates Reitherman’s odd
temperament, gloomy yet full of the future, always lingering on the
littoral: “Throw the ashes on my shore/I’ll return in time.” EG

This is the first song on Creaturesque, and it begins far
away: a rumbling, a dawning thought, an approaching thing. And then
Reitherman’s voice—a drawn-out “s” cutting through the air, to
make the word “staring.” It opens into a mellow melody, and then, a
minute and 40 seconds in, it opens up again, to a giddy melody within a
melody—an instantaneously cheering collection of keyboards and
horns and hand claps that will make you want to take off your shoes and
dance around in your socks (Reitherman calls it an answer, a cure, to
the melody of “Lolita”). It’s one of the catchiest songs on the album
and a pretty good indicator of what’s to come: a summery, energetic,
not-brooding bunch of songs about, essentially, happiness. CF

Sometimes the great things that happen to you in life are as bad as
the horrible things—unexpected, terrifying, revealing. There is a
kind of violence to anything sudden. I remember a great thing happening
at work (a promotion I didn’t expect)—and the feeling it
inspired, instead of pride, was panic. For months, I would come home
from work and, to untangle my brain, cue up this song, crank the iPod
volume, and listen to the words while the very old elevator—no
door, just an accordion gate—passed floor after empty floor. “It
summed up the anxious way I am,” Reitherman sings a few lines in, the
last three words drawn out, ascending notes in a satisfying chord. Last
line: “I took a hit and I tasted mistakes.” The words are all about
grappling with anxiety, but the song itself? Blissful. It begins and
ends with tambourines and wind chimes and a heavily sedated beat. It
has calm bones and muscles made of Xanax. CF

“Groundswell” is Throw Me the Statue’s longest song at 5:24, but it
doesn’t feel like it. The easy electric-guitar riffs speed and corner
around the song pretty relentlessly, only giving way to a bass-and-drum
groove just before the chorus and stopping for a skin-tingling split
second just after. The second time that groove comes in, at the 3:30
mark, it gathers tension-building up-picked guitars, mumbling and
layered background vocals, and a catchy little keyboard riff that play
and peter out for two minutes while Reitherman repeats, “Walking with
your aims low/That’s a part of it,” punctuated here and there by an
enthusiastic “hey!” and “c’mon!” (Also: How great is it that this album
contains both “palindrome” and “pantomime” in its lyrics? Great,
right?) Throughout the song, horns swell up and burst into perfect
little geysers of brass (of the many songs that TMTS perform with a
horn section when they play live, this is the one that most demands
it). EG

A rock beat, wall-to-wall with lyrics, all about loops and holes and
sinking and rolling, sung by a sinking and rolling voice: “I run, but I
can’t outrun/Each tug just pulls me deep/Is this how I go?/Is this
where I sleep?” It’s one of those songs that seems to be made out of
rubber bands, tightly contained in its own containers, a ball of
energy. CF

If you put this song on a mix between two New Pornographers’ songs,
you might not notice the switch—similar tone; similar energy;
bright, changing rhythms; a melody with lots of recurring components.
Or does it sound like first-album Shins? The lyrics, naturally, make
almost no sense: “Crazy for the chase/But taken to some devil’s
luscious place/You’re hiking in jungles, baby/But the jungles change.”
But there’s a kind of dorky playing around to the nonsense, and the
repeated image of a girl falling through the air (“If you could see
that she’s falling, falling”) is satisfying to contemplate. I picture
her high in a castle somewhere, listening to Throw Me the Statue and
brushing her hair, and then flying through the air, into someone’s
arms, though it’s a different person than she expects by the time she
lands. CF

“The Happiest Man on This Plane”

A brooding, torpid, kind-of-whiny song with melodramatic lyrics and
a discomforting horn section. CF

“Tag”

This song turns out to be pretty great, but it’s almost impossible
to get past the anxious-making chord progression and
falling-through-a-bad-dream percussion of its first few moments. Just
skip the first 15 seconds. EG

“If This Is It”
(Huey Lewis cover)

Stick to Guided by Voices, guys. EG

“Written in Heart
Signs, Faintly” (Live)

An energetic, drum-circle-ish reinterpretation of a song whose whole
point (on Moonbeams at least) is its non-frenziedness. It was
already a good song. Give the drums a break. CF

“Your Girlfriend’s Car”

Would it have killed you to write a second verse? There are only,
like, eight words in this whole song. EG