Centro-Matic - Love You Just the Same (2003)Senior year of high school, my friend Beth and I bought tickets to see Mr. Ben Kweller at Marquee Theatre in Tempe. We were both huge Sha Sha fans, and in typical high school fashion, we showed up when the doors opened to catch him. However, there was an opening band called Centro-Matic from Denton, TX (friends with Ben, of course). At the risk of falling into some bad cliche, it was one of those rare moments where you are immediately drawn to something on the first time hearing it. It was incredible. After seeing them and Ben, we decided we were fully satisfied with our evening and left before the headliner that we hadn't really heard of. Did I mention the headliner was Death Cab For Cutie? Yeah, I suck sometimes.
On our way out, we pooled together whatever cash we had leftover after paying for parking (even then! ugh, Marquee) and were able to purchase exactly one copy of their latest record, Love You just the Same. At that point, MP3 players were fairly rare (and we were fairly poor) so we decided to have joint custody of the album. The first week, Beth made a burn of the CD, but got to keep the artwork and look at it while I had the actual album copy. Then we switched. Nowadays, I can only hope to get that excited to take a night, listen to a record and flip through the album art.
Aside from that nerd story, this is an absolutely fantastic record. I ended up buying a couple more of their albums, but this has the best production quality and cohesiveness out of all of them. Will Johnson's raspy voice and singing with clinched teeth reminds me a lot of the singer from Great Lake Swimmers,but set to some heavier rock tunes and beautiful harmonies. I found out later that they had put out a staggering seven other albums before Love You Just the Same, and four since. They are very lyrically fantastic and avoid the folk-rock habit of hippy blues/rock jamming by keeping the songs short and strong. And as far as the album artwork is concerned, I still get chills and just as excited when I see it flash across across my iPod.
Note: The video says Will Johnson, who is essentially the brainchild of this operation, but this is "Flashes and Cables" from the album, just acoustic:
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