Masterful pop song structures: Junior Boys “So This Is Goodbye”
Montreal im Schnee, 2025 (Photo: Thomas Venker)
Junior Boys
“So This Is Goodbye”
(Domino)
As soon as I played the promo CD that the Spex editorial team sent me (in the summer of 2006) for the first time, I knew that this was an album that could claim a kind of magic all its own. At the time, I found the record to be extremely “right” because it sounded contemporary and eerily familiar.
On this, their second album, the Junior Boys succeed in transforming the sound of house into masterful pop song structures characterized by a diffuse 80s feel—like Hall & Oates without the posturing and produced by Larry Levan. It's a sound that seems to produce subtle bubbling bubbles, contoured but fragile and floating. There are references to dub aesthetics, which reveal themselves in echo-like textures. The music does without reverb, is always compressed and condensed, but with soft edges.
“So This Is Goodbye” offers no resistance, adapting to its surroundings in the best ambient manner, but at the same time evoking images of deserted winter landscapes – “close the windows in my room, it gets so cold at night,” sings Jeremy Greenspan in “Like A Child.” Temperature repeatedly plays a role in the lyrics, marking the boundary between inside and outside. This is a potential hibernation record, perhaps because you can determine the internal temperature yourself: “I keep it warm / at 34” (“Count Souvenirs”).
Subliminally, this also deals with the feelings that arise when you grow up. The euphoria of encountering pop culture for the first time (“you're like a pre-teen, chasing all the latest news”), which you want to repeat over and over again (which is why you start collecting records—always stringing together the same thing in variations, cultivating serial passion—“painful hobbies that linger on,” as it says here). By focusing on places of transition such as shopping malls and hotels, the lyrics reflect the transitional state of growing up on a spatial level. This gives the album a fleeting orientation, always looking back, which is already evident in the album title. Nevertheless, the tempo here is by no means intoxicating, but rather subdued; the three up-tempo pieces seem to serve more as an alibi for the assumption that electronic music of the noughties is naturally inscribed with the dance dictum. “So This Is Goodbye” is fundamentally slowed down, attempting to capture striking moments from memory in retrospect – “back at home / we fix old radios” – this line already struck me in 2006 when I first heard it.
But perhaps repairing radios is akin to a moment of self-reflection that creates calm (and the radio as an object is also a carrier of memories, a souvenir, in fact). In fact, the sound of the record seems to transform the dissonant background noise of life and/or broken radios into a kind of vacuum—the impression of emptiness conveyed by the music translates into a positively connoted tidiness after chaos (perhaps Marie Kondō would also like the record?).
The approach of superficial sweet harmony always has its deep structural opposite. The apparent contradiction of distance/closeness and coldness/warmth dissolves in the fluid synthesis that electronic pop music is capable of achieving. “When No-One Cares,” a Frank Sinatra song, sounds completely unessentialist and anti-identitarian here, not like the old blue-eyed singer, but like a song the Junior Boys could have written.
I remember sitting at my desk in my teenage bedroom in early 1987, preparing for a history exam. It's snowing outside, and the trees and roofs are covered in snow. This makes everything muffled and quiet. In this atmosphere, I manage to focus on the moment with complete ease. That's what this album sounds like.
Montreal im Schnee, 2025 (Photo: Thomas Venker)
