The Blow

Poor Aim: Love Songs

(K Records)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

The Blow that most people know—the Blow consisting of Khaela Maricich and Jona Bechtolt, the duo responsible for last year’s well-received electro-pop record Paper Television—is the result of a happy experiment, an EP that could easily have been a one-off, but turned into something more substantial. The EP, Poor Aim: Love Songs, now sees its reissue, thanks to the success of Paper Television. Every indication is that Maricich will often be carrying on with The Blow sans Bechtolt, who has a busy career going on under the alias YACHT (album out in May). She’s a big talent and should be more than capable of keeping the momentum going, but Poor Aim, like Paper Television, makes a strong case for the fruits of the duo's collaboration.

The first seven tracks of the 14-track reissue are the original EP—and three of them are bona fide A-list. Poor Aim opens with a winning tale about losing a boy (“Hey Boy” – as in “Hey, boy, why you didn’t call me?”) Maricich has a girlish twist to her voice, particularly when she gets into her flat confessions—like when she goes spoken-word for the admission that “Really, you just injured my pride.” Somehow both enigmatic and personal, her songs pop with personality without ever feeling contrived.

Also excellent are the Postal Service-esque electro-warmth of “The Sky Opened Wide Like the Tide,” a propulsive narrative about feeling lost in your own hometown, and the twitchy, breathy, vampy, clever “Hock It.”

Two quibbles: First, condolences to anyone who, after Paper Television took off, clutched their limited-edition copy of Poor Aim to their chests and felt cool to be among the 1,000 who were on the bandwagon early (full disclosure: this reviewer is not one of those cool people). Obviously bands operate on supply-and-demand principles all the time, and should be entitled to re-release material accordingly…and obviously there’s always a pretense of exclusivity with super-indie albums, but it was a little more overtly stated with the Pregnancy Series that birthed Poor Aim (and several other interesting collaborations)—in fact, the limited number of releases seemed to be part of the whole point of the series. “Only 1,000 copies made… until people want to buy more,” just doesn’t quite have the same romance.

The fat silver lining for the owners of the original Poor Aim is that they don’t really need to shell out the bucks for the reissue, because the new remixes that span the second half are fairly extraneous, even though it was an interesting idea to have Maricich and Bechtolt revisit the songs themselves on a couple of occasions (YACHT’s “Hock It” is the best of the bunch). Overall, though, the primary objective of the remixes seems to be to isolate, distort and bury the accessibility and simple warmth of the original versions.

But for everyone else in the target audience, Poor Aim is an easy recommendation, and one that can be gobbled up in a single serving even by today’s short attention span standards. Charming, smart and catchy as hell, Poor Aim and Paper Television are the past and present of an act that could be a force in indie-pop’s future.