Some things defy adequate description. The essence of a brilliant sunset, for example, can never be captured properly with a few words. Some may try, but ultimately even the very best will fail. Similarly, one finds such a dilemma in describing music. Despite the urge to categorize everything, it's rare to find a band that fits perfectly into a widely accepted definition of a specific genre. And as music gets better, it becomes even more difficult to classify it. There's always some intangible quality preventing certain bands from being pigeonholed.
Such is the dilemma when writing about For The Greater Good. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a weak, lackluster or otherwise sub-par effort. In fact, it's spectacularly good. The problem comes when trying to describe it with a few statements. Unlike a very bad album, which can be described and dismissed in a few economical phrases, albums like this require a more thorough examination.
Since seeing is believing, then, perhaps this is where one begins. The quartet includes no photos of themselves anywhere in the liner notes, instead using stock pictures from the 1940s and '50s, of smiling female flight attendants and factory workers, conveying the sort of TV-perfect happiness governments used to use as a symbol of the ideal worker. The names, too, hearken back a half-century. Leggy Limbeaux, Trixie Riptide, Kitty Kowabunga and Betty Boomskins are the names given by the band members, creating the sort of cartoonish air one might expect to see in rock 'n' roll caricatures of the '50s and '60s.
The band is simultaneously a musical anachronism -- they wouldn't be out of place in the surf-guitar revolution of the 1960s -- and a torch-bearer of the riot-grrrl movement of the mid-1990s. In the opening track, "Cheated," for example, the band gives hope that the absence of Sleater-Kinney is now being filled. Kowabunga's guttural howl recalls that of S-K's Corin Tucker, while the overall feel of the music recalls the Olympia band at their best. However, when listening closer, one hears the organ, which wouldn't sound out of place in a z-grade teenage beach movie.
The album is full of such conflicting currents. Just when you think you have its measure, something happens to keep you off-balance. But this is hardly a bad thing; in an age in which most bands try to find one sound and stick to it resolutely, you have to admire a band that's willing to be creative enough to blend sounds, not merely from different genres, but from different generations -- especially, as is the case with the Moto-Litas, where it's done so well.
Perhaps, then, we need to admit that words aren't always adequate, or even necessary. Many things are visual or aural on a level so basic they must be seen or heard to be understood. For The Greater Good may be one such work. Like any other great album, it must be heard to be understood. So get moving -- find it, listen to it and love it.
