Wizard of Blahs

Back when Ballard resident Eric Elbogen’s one-man band was called
Say Hi to Your Mom and recording entire albums about vampires and
science fiction, it was easy to dismiss his act as merely cute. But
then Elbogen decided to leave Your Mom out of it and trade the
sometimes-overwrought geekery for less-
idiosyncratic indie pop on
2007’s The Wishes and the Glitch. Now recording as simply Say
Hi, Elbogen has followed that album with Oohs & Aahs, his
sixth record and first for local label Barsuk. It is both his best
album yet and—as odious and overused as this term is—his
most mature.

“They started to say that with the last one,” laughs Elbogen, 32. “I
don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I really don’t think of
myself at all as the same person I was when I wrote the first few
records.”

Elbogen, who grew up in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley and went to
college at UCLA, formed Say Hi to Your Mom in Brooklyn in 2002. He
released three synth-riddled pop-rock albums under that name on his own
Euphobia Records while at the same time working pseudonymously as a
music critic. In 2006, tired of New York City’s hectic pace, he
relocated to Seattle and released his final album under the longer
original moniker, the underrated Impeccable Blahs.

“I sort of stopped [writing about music] when music started paying
the bills,” Elbogen says. “Which was also kind of around the time that
some of the negative reviews started to roll in. It was partly a
financial thing and partly—the first couple times that someone
just trashed me and the records, I decided that was something I didn’t
want to do to another band.”

Indeed, a pair of bad reviews from Pitchfork even moved Elbogen to
pen an open letter to the hegemonic rock-crit outlet.

“I mean, sure, when I read a bad review it bums me out,” he
continues. “But I do my best to ignore it. I do my thing and make
records that I’m happy with and go to bed at the end of every day being
proud of—and if people don’t like it, they don’t like it.”

Still—perhaps coincidentally, perhaps subliminally—the
very elements for which the critics most panned Say Hi’s early albums
(overly precious, sometimes-nonsensical lyrics) are absent on his most
recent records. Instead of using undead bloodsuckers as obvious
metaphors for doomed romantic relationships, on Oohs & Aahs Elbogen plays it relatively straight, singing personal and
character-rich songs about love and heartbreak that are simply
affecting and subtly catchy.

“There will always be a little playfulness in everything I do, but I
think it was a lot more apparent on the older records. On this one and
the last one, I tried to find a nice balance between poignancy and not
taking myself too seriously, instead of just making it a straight-up
song about a robot or a vampire.”

Indeed, on Oohs & Aahs there’s only one monster, and even
it is confined to the suggestive shadows between the lines on “Dramatic
Irony”; the closest we get to the undead is Elbogen apologizing, “But
Maurine, I can’t come to your party ’cause I think that I’m dead.”

It’s also his first album to not feature some kind of robot on the
cover; instead, there’s a skeleton pointing a rifle at an old man. Each
Say Hi record has been a different pastel monochrome, and although
Elbogen says this one is red, some people say it’s more pink. (He’s
already had a pink record. When pressed, he accepts that it might be a
“mature pink.”)

The album announces its seriousness with the resounding piano thuds
that open “Elouise” over a foundation of steadily strummed bass guitar.
The song is a paean to a late-night indie-radio siren: “Somewhere
between the high 80s and low 90s FM,” he sings, “Elouise plays the
first Violent Femmes for those awake from twelve to two a.m.” And
Elbogen’s voice—always on the softer, sighing side of
things—sounds appropriately dreamy and sleepy-eyed. (This song
also totally baits this publication by mentioning The Stranger by name—young musicians, take note of this exciting synergistic
strategy!) It’s a great song, maybe the album’s best—pretty and
catchy and heartfelt and totally destined for way better time slots on
KEXP than the one heralded therein.

But there’s much more going on here lyrically than just the
abandonment of robot and zombie tropes. Elbogen is a much better
lyricist than his early detractors may have given him credit for.
Consider the word placement in “The Stars Just Blink for Us,” a
declaration not of his love’s universal importance or explosive passion
but of its quiet, slow-
burning contentment: The stars don’t blink
“just for us” but “just blink for us,” merely twinkling rather
than going supernova.

On “Hallie and Henry” (the album is full of the kinds of names that
cool young parents are probably giving their newborns right now),
Elbogen lays into a stereotypically Seattle character: the wallflower
who would rather passive-aggressively carp from the sidelines than
actually risk getting involved and maybe having some fun (clearly,
Elbogen wasn’t cut out for music criticism).

“Henry is the guy who I’ve always lost the girl to,” explains
Elbogen. “He’s just this terrible dude, he’s a downer, and, I don’t
know, there’s something about him that the girls gravitate toward
instead of the nice-guy thing.” (Elbogen’s slouching, nerdy—but
ultimately loveable!—persona is like the archetypal “nice-guy
thing.”) The song also has a line about “mak[ing] friends with the cool
kids,” which kind of begs the questions: How many moderately successful
rock records must a self-styled nerd make before he’s no longer a nerd?
How old is too old to care about “the cool kids”? Thankfully, for the
most part on Oohs & Aahs Elbogen is no longer posing as a
nerd playing at being a rocker, nor a cool kid playing at being a nerd;
he seems to have finally acclimated to his actual position somewhere in
between—his geekiest reference here is to a Built to Spill
7-inch.

Twice on the album—on “November Was White, December Was Grey”
and “Audrey”—the lyrics of the songs just trail off, dot dot dot,
a cute but effective lyrical device, as though Elbogen just can’t bring
himself to get to the point of these songs.

Musically, too, Oohs & Aahs marks a progression for
Elbogen. Like all his other albums, Elbogen recorded it all alone at
home onto his computer, with a monastic kind of isolation and work
ethic. But for this one, he set himself a rule to use as much
traditional acoustic instrumentation as possible, though he admits “a
few synths still snuck in there.” It’s his least ferocious, most moping
album yet—the sound of a power-pop band powering down—but
it’s a good fit, his deferential hum of a voice and a faded robot
fixation reminiscent of Grandaddy at their most mellow. Elbogen has
always had an easy hand with unobtrusive but naggingly catchy pop
hooks, and Oohs & Aahs is no exception. The triumphantly
echoing “Elouise,” the tensely eager verse and ascending chorus of
“Hallie and Henry,” the acoustically mild but still swinging “Oh Oh Oh
Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh,” the synthetic fanfare of “Maurine”—all of this
is major earworm material.

Oohs & Aahs may be more minor pop pleasure than
fame-making masterpiece. And while Elbogen does worry, he seems to have
a healthy attitude about his career trajectory.

“I’m 32 years old, and at some point if you’re still selling the
same amount of records and playing the same 250-capacity rooms and
you’re getting closer to 40 or pushing beyond that, it becomes kind of
sad. Especially when you encounter bands that are doing super well and
everyone in the band is 19 to 22 years old.

“But if I stress about it too much,” he continues, “I look at my
record collection and realize that there are really amazing bands out
there that are older that are still doing it and still doing well, and
that gives me hope.”