Album Of The Week: Smith Westerns Soft Will

In the mid-'60s, when garage rock was first starting to be a thing, bands weren't trying to play garage rock. They were trying to be the Beatles, or (more often) the Rolling Stones. But their sloppy approximations had their own headlong charm, and years later, when Lenny Kaye assembled the first Nuggets compilation, they were retroactively grouped together, considered an exciting movement in hindsight. They were only really garage rock by dint of their own smallness and sloppiness, but plenty of these bands came up with amazing songs anyway. (A few of them even moved beyond the genre, like the Electric Prunes, who started out as an especially wiggy psych-rock band before hooking up with jazz-funk composer David Axelrod and making some real transcendent weirdness.) That combination of inspiration and limitation mostly doesn't happen in garage rock anymore; bands fetishize and attempt to recreate the sloppy rush of the bands that were trying to be something else. But Chicago's Smith Westerns, barely out of high school when they made their first album, actually were trying to be something else. On their self-titled debut, you could hear that they wanted to be hair-flipping T. Rex glam stars; it's just that they were recording quickly and cheaply and hadn't yet figured out how to be the band they wanted to be. Now, three albums in, they've pretty much become what they wanted to be, and there's not one iota of garage rock in their sound. And as someone who really liked that first record, it almost pains me to say this, but they're better now than they were.