Back From the (Old) U.S.S.R.

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin has had a busy, productive year.

How is an indie rock album like a school project?

The more accurate question might be, “How is it not?”.

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s Philip Dickey is somewhat sheepish when he talks about the delays on Pershing, the group’s new album due out on April 8, 2008. Dickey is sheepish because, like any group of procrastinating students, the delays have been all the band’s. SSLYBY’s label, Polyvinyl, had originally wanted the album last March, but on the morning of December 12, as he sat sipping coffee at MudHouse, the band was still putting the final production touches on the much-anticipated follow-up to 2005’s nationally acclaimed Broom. The band—consisting of Dickey, John Robert Cardwell, Will Knauer and Jonathan James—has been responsible, with almost zero oversight, for the writing, recording and production of Pershing. By the time this story hits racks, Dickey says, it should be in the hands of professional mixers in Boston.

Such a label support staff will mean Pershing should have a better production quality than Broom, a fact that might cause chagrin among the SSLYBY faithful—Broom was popular with many precisely because of its amateur quirks. That said, Dickey insists Pershing will fit with the Yeltsin theme, and that the band didn’t want to try and fabricate the honest lo-fi sound of Broom; Dickey says doing so would be “like a lie.” John Robert Cardwell, the band’s primary vocalist, says they put “a lot more thought” into Pershing, which is part of the reason it took so long to get started.

Fortunately, fans need look no farther than the new album’s name to see the same old Yeltsin spirit; Pershing simultaneously references an important Springfield landmark (Pershing Middle School, where Dickey attended) and an important-yet-obscure historical figure, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, a World War I general and Missouri native. Like Boris Yeltsin, “[Pershing] is a historical figure that really did shape the modern world, but no one ever really thinks about him,” Dickey says. But even this history lesson is mostly in jest, and portends no political agenda in the group’s sophomore LP (and first with Polyvinyl): “We’re aware of things, and worry about them, but in the end just write songs about girls… I wish politics were more like that,” Dickey says. “We have a political name, but never ever will you hear us make a political reference.”

That political name was a big reason that, last summer, the band was asked to play in Moscow at the Afisha Picnic Festival—It was almost a weird kind of homecoming for the band. And while a bunch of guys from Springfield, Missouri may have no more real connection to Moscow as Jared Leto has to the planet Mars, they played the “Americans in Russia” schtick for all it was worth. “The borscht was amazing,” says Cardwell.

He and Dickey recount the day they bribed a guard to let them be the very first visitors inside Vladimir Lenin’s tomb in Red Square; for the price of a day at a water park, Cardwell says, they were able to see the entombed body of the original Soviet, a ritual of, as they found out, some import in the former USSR. “We were giggling until the guards started looking at us,” Dickey says. “If I had hadn’t shut up I was probably going to get shot.”
Other laughs included a night at a Russian techno club, followed by a cab ride home with the cabbie jamming out (non-ironically) to R. Kelly's “I Believe I Can Fly”.

But since that trip to Russia, SSLYBY as been almost exclusively in Springfield, playing shows and working up to 12 hours a day for three months at a pop on Pershing. Band member Jonathan James, a full band participant despite the fact that he has declined to sign a contract with Polyvinyl, has taken on much of the production on the album. “We find ways to pay him,” Dickey says. “All the work he’s done is probably worth a couple of nice cars. We think he should win a Grammy.”

Such words indicate the band thinks Pershing has been worth the wait—for the group as artists, as well as Polyvinyl as a business. “I think this could be that next step,” Dickey says. “I think that because Broom came out of nowhere… I think that could happen all over again.” And, like Broom, any success will be to the band’s credit. Though having a label lends credibility, and helps land gigs like opening for Mutemath (which SSLYBY did earlier in 2007), the work has been all their own, which makes it all the sweeter when the project comes back with all A’s—even if they turn it in at the last minute.

“We were all college F-ups, Dickey says. “This is sort of our vindication.”

More on Pershing

• As per usual, SSLYBY’s latest effort has been made in combination of big-time national (Pedro the Lion’s T.W. Walsh has been involved, and Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla loaned the band some mics) and local friends (Molly Healey on fiddle, local graphic gurus Tom Hembree and Aaron Scott did the album art).

• Regular concertgoers have probably heard a few of the songs that will appear—SSLYBY has been working on new material for better than a year.

• Much of the recording took place at the Springfield home of Will Knauer’s aunt, rather than on Weller Avenue, the band’s traditional home. SSLYBY also spent a some time recording in Wilmington, North Carolina (where Philip ran into Jason Schwartzman—ask him about it). Production has been done primarily at the Pilates studio near Staxx.

• Album art had not been approved for release by Polyvinyl’s PR staff at press time.

• More good news for SSYLBY fans: The band’s trademark schtick of switching up parts, including drums and vocals, has not gone away. No parts are listed on the CD; a nod, Dickey says, to the Beatles. “No one knows who played cowbell on ‘Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’. There’s a legend it was George Harrison’s girlfriend.”

• April 8 is the scheduled release date for Pershing, which should be available on iTunes and local band-friendly stores—think CD Warehouse, possibly Borders—in Springfield. The band will play a local release gig or two, but will be leaving on tour fairly quickly after the release, Dickey and Cardwell say.