Mood Paint

The songwriting duo from Mood Paint went on to found my favorite band of all time, the 1990’s Portland, OR-based Pond. One of the many fantastic bands in Sub Pop’s PDX stable, Pond evolved from a grunge-adjacent power pop band into one of the most unique and transcendent rock bands to showcase the potential of alternative music in the 90s. Their relative obscurity (as well as their name being co-opted by a pretty cool band from Australia) is a tragedy I still don’t quite comprehend. 

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Prior to moving to Portland and pairing up with a new drummer, this songwriting duo lived in Juneau AK and released a demo with a local drummer. The six songs on this demo show a very different side of these songwriters’ influences and motivations, and also provides a fascinating look at their creative process before they found the approach that would catapult them to the local and regional successes they later achieved.

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Mood Paint’s demo came out in 1989, and it has big eighties alternative energy all over it. Quickly strummed acoustic guitars, peppy rhythms, tight melodies, gated drum sounds: it often sounds like a band trying to paint by numbers over the Smiths’ catalogue, albeit with cheerier lyrics and in major keys. It also bears a striking resemblance to some of the peppier alternative bands coming out of the Pacific Northwest around that time, specifically the Dharma Bums. That said, there are moments that suggest these songwriters were interested in expanding into more sonically original areas.

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The peppy, sixteenth-beat driven opener “When You Get What You Want” repeats a predictable chord progression and layers on a sappy major key melody that sounds like it was written to keep the parents happy at the outdoor barbecue. Second track “Cracks and Swirls” opens with a bootlegged snippet of punkish distortion, something Pond would later indulge in many b-sides and non-album tracks. But that energy is a bait-and switch, with the the main song’s twinkling guitarwork calling both REM and The Byrds to mind. But within this one-minute ditty, there’s a strength in the vocal delivery that suggests a more cathartis-driven approach to music than either of those touchpoints. The third track, “25 Years Ago,” showcase this singer’s penchant for sneaking hooks into otherwise mundane lyrical lines, something he’d continue to develop and implement throughout later work. 

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The second half of this demo starts to get a little more suggestive of the duo’s songwriting trajectory. “Florida” is a mash of punk-skiffle jitters, with yelped vocals and surprising chord changes. Fascinatingly, there’s also a bridge featuring slowed-down vocals pitched low, a tactic they’d return to on “Artificial Turf” from their sophomore record on Sub Pop. The off-time strumming and overall energy of the track suggests a willingness to explore, and that willingness to explore drove their evolution from Mood Paint through all three studio albums Pond released. It also shows up on “Everything,” the next track on the demo, which begins with a hard-hitting bossa nova-esque progression laid straight by the rhythm section. While there’s a little more willingness to be weird here, pop foundations remain firmly intact, much as they did when they began relying on distortion and gain for dynamics. Rather than succumbing to the dreary lite-metal of their Seattle contemporaries, Pond always rooted their angst in uplifting catharsis, finding powerful ways to release optimism through melody and craft. An early example of this tendency shows up in the coda of “Everything,” where the guitar picks though discordant notes to create an uncanny melody that could, with less dynamics, come off as twee. But pairing it with driving drums and a rumbling bassling provides a momentous closure to the song. “The Dull Earth,” the demo’s closer, is the clearest arrow pointing to these songwriters’ future. It’s the first instance where the guitars and bass operate independently but in concert, creating a more orchestral sound of competing melodies. This would come to be a defining feature of their best work. While “The Dull Earth” doesn’t pull it off with as much eclat as their later efforts, most of that is due to the primary riff ripping off Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone” note for note. When Mood Paint move away from that derivative line, the song shines from its own energy and lights the way to their triumphant future.

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For anyone other than die-hard Pond fans like yours truly, I’m not sure there’s much in Mood Paint to warrant a listen. In fact, it’s not officially available anywhere so if you’re intrigued you’ll have to do some sleuthing to find a pirated copy. But for those of us who stood front and center at dozens of their shows in our formative years, who lost a shoe while crowd surfing to “Tree,” who were inspired to start playing music when the bassist told the audience to go start a band, this is a crucial and revealing artifact. It underscores the importance of everything we’re trying to do here at Early Work: make music, identify what makes it special, and turn that into something with the power to change the lives of the people who hear it. Without Mood Paint, humble as it is, Early Work Records very likely wouldn’t exist.