Ask Phil Dickey (second from left) how he celebrated the arrival of his band’s fifth LP, The High Country, and it’s clear his idea of partying rings sugarier than most frontmen.
“There’s a donut place across the street from me that makes a weird special everyday, so I asked if they’d make a record-sized donut for us. So we released a donut and a record on the same day… we’ll probably be touring in support of the donut soon.”
Dickey’s humor, which flips between easygoing and playfully self-deprecating, comes almost as a necessity given the fact that he’s been in a band named Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin for the past decade. In that span, Boris’s summer-affixed twee pop has garnered some seriously devoted support, including a long standing relationship with indie institution Polyvinyl, features on teen shows like “16 and Pregnant” and “The O.C.” (although the latter, per the band’s Facebook history, was canceled within weeks of featuring “Oregon Girl”), and several tours as far reaching as their namesake’s homeland of Russia.
Amidst the accolades though, Dickey and his comrades have maintained a consistent knack for effortlessly breezy but subtly brooding anthems addressed to the lingering adolescence in all of us. A penchant for slipping gloom underneath the sunniness appeared as early as their debut LP Broom when they placed the aforementioned “Oregon Girl”, a single-ready ode to marrying right out of college, next to “House Fire” (sample lyric: “Your pretty face is soaked in blood / you know, I still find you dashing”), but The High Country marks Boris’s first foray into eclipsing their sunny sound to match their soft-spoken angst.
“We’ve always played louder at shows, but when it comes time to record, it always ends up sounding super clean. I like the idea of albums that are recorded on a four track and sound fuzzed out,” Dickey concluded, citing Tony Molina and “Allison” by Pixies as reference points. “It just seemed like a really good idea to put a huge amount of fuzz on every track.”
The High Country is far from becoming the band’s “token sad record” though, boasting endlessly sunny riffs on opener “Line On You” and Dickey’s ethereal vocals that somehow find a meeting point between Pinkerton-era Rivers Cuomo and Bilinda Butcher. “I still like the idea of a two minute pop song,” Dickey assured us, but the one caveat on Country was that the hook had to be “found through the fuzz.”
One fan that found the hook early was Mercedes Benz, who copped the album’s lead single “Step Brother City” for their online ‘mixed tape.’ “It was really cool for our rich uncles, but it just felt confusing to everyone else,” Dickey admitted, adding the hope of opening for Tom Petty if the Baby Boomer set responded well to the mix. SSLYBY seem to take similar notions of seasoned band milestones with humble downplaying, including the notion of doing an anniversary tour for the ten-year old Broom. “It’s still our biggest selling album, but it didn’t go, like, Gold,” he says half-jokingly, “or Silver… or Bronze.” The compromise was that they’d play a few Broom songs each night and have a shirt with the album art on it.
If anything, the most recent high mark in SSLYBY’s career was something most bands fear becoming most: a wedding band. “My wife’s sister got married, so we learned a bunch of Beatles songs and a Taylor Swift song so her little cousin could sing with us,” Dickey recounted gleefully. There were jokes traded about the wedding circuit becoming Boris Yeltsin’s end goal once the Mercedes royalties fade, but there wasn’t an ounce of irony when Phil declared it “the best show of their summer so far.”
Such is the stream of genuine goodness that can’t help but shine from everything Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin puts out there. Despite Country detailing nights of getting “so goddamn drunk” and calling girls named Madeline for a ride, there’s a sense that SSLYBY will almost certainly find well-adjusted happiness outside of their songs, whether it comes in the form of semi-consistent wedding gigs or a cartoonishly big donut once in a while.
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin will be playing at Great Scott this Friday, 7/31, with Sinnet and Surf Vietnam opening. Tickets are available here.