The Santiago Steps hail from Orange County, California, which is stereotypically home of everything that is unholy about the Golden State: Mindless upper-class consumer culture, Disneyland, Bob Dornan, No Doubt. The Santiago Steps are not unholy, but there's no question, listening to some of the undeniably odd tracks to be found in A-flutter, that living in a sun-bright plastic world has given their collective brain something of a twist. In this case, the question is, in which direction is the twist going?
Take "No More Clones." "I don't want a new mom, I want the one I know," singer Carolyn Davidson complains, sweetly. "No more clones, please." A complaint about a culture in which wives and mothers are interchangeable and to be replaced when they start to wrinkle and leather? Or simply a repurposed college-era science fiction short story? Geeks or satirists? Nerds or social commentators?
Actually there's no reason they can't be both. Carolyn Davidson freely admits her geeky leanings: "I'm your nerd rock girl," she trills in the aptly named "Nerd Rock Girl," trying to keep the attention of a faithless boy pining for that popular girl by noting (all-too-correctly) "she will never leave the biker for you." Just what every boy wants: A girl who knows her place in your affections, and uses it passively-aggressively to keep you around. So alluring. So scary.
But at the same time, The Santiago Steps recount suburban scenes that most of us who lived there at one point or another have had. "The Frisbee Slide," perfectly observes suburban kids doing a truly stupid thing for no good reason — in this case, launching themselves down the street on a Frisbee set on the ground. These experiments in inertia end badly, of course, with a litany of snapped wrists and munched BMX wheel spokes, but before that bad end comes the moment of grace: "for that second when you were sliding/ Their voices blurred and your face disappeared/ And for that second man you weren't hiding/ The world was aching no pretending at all." If you ask the kid with the snapped wrist, he probably would have told you that moment made it worth it.
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