The Nylons was a group of actors who used to like to go up to the roof and sing doo-wop. (This noun-verb agreement thing is very complicated when dealing with bands – even though Nylons is plural, it is the name of a singular entity, so it must be treated as a singular noun, which results in jarring constructions like “Nylons was”.) Realizing that they had something, they went into a studio, rented a drum machine, and laid down some tracks. It took them an album to warm up, but they hit the mark squarely with this album, called One Size Fits All. Unfortunately, they then overshot the mark and produced nothing but dreck from here on out, but this one album is spectacular.
Too bad I can’t listen to it.
I was heavily into this album the summer after I graduated from Hampshire. After finally finding true love at the end of my last year there, I moved into an apartment in Northampton with my sweathard G and my best friend Geoff. Geoff was going back to Hampshire for another year, G was going to school in England in September, and I was planning to move to NYC to start my meteoric rise to...well...I hadn’t quite figured that out yet, but I couldn’t stay in Massachusetts anymore and I knew I could get a job and I had a few friends and I didn’t need a car if I moved back to the city, so that’s where I was planning on going.
So, that summer was sort of the last hurrah. I worked a terrible job with Geoff setting up tables for banquets and meetings at the local Hilton, did a couple of film production gigs, including a day with MTV, and got arrested for driving a stolen car – but those are all different stories.
Eventually, inevitably, the end of the summer came, and it was time to move out of our apartment and go on with our lives. Geoff moved back to Hampshire, and G and I packed up our belongings and went down to NYC, to stay at my friend Eric’s apartment until G’s flight to London. Those last few days were bittersweet, as we walked around the city pretending not to be in the shadow of her impending departure. On the last night, we kicked Eric out of his apartment so we could have some time alone. I put on the Nylons disc, more out of habit than anything else, and suddenly the whole album seemed sad and morose. Those boppy, fun-loving tracks seemed to disappear and songs like Town Without Pity and Goodbye loomed large. That night, there was sad sex and lots of tears and that terrible feeling of being on a precipice, slipping away and waiting for the inevitable bone-crunching impact. And ever since then, I’ve been unable to fully enjoy this album.
Which is too bad, because it’s really good. I’ve always been a big fan of good vocal harmonies, and these guys are razor sharp. The songs – a mix of standards and originals – are exquisitely arranged and performed. The sparse drum machine backing track is the perfect staccato accompaniment to the smooth, creamy vocals. I really like the infectious energy of Bop Till You Drop but I find special solace in That Kind of Man, probably the only song I’ve ever heard that proclaims a man’s right to slow a relationship down and not just go leaping into bed at every opportunity.
The Nylons briefly revived a wonderful vocal form and updated it masterfully, but, unfortunately, they were unable to leave well enough alone and their subsequent releases lost the careful balance of light-heartedness, technology, and vocal prowess and became sodden affairs full of too much everything. They went from airy cream puff to peanut butter chocolate cheese cake and collapsed under their own weight. But for this wonderful album, one size did indeed fit all.