Let’s Active – Cypress

This 1984 album probably gained most of its attention due to the fact that Let’s Active main man Mitch Easter was notable for being the co-producer of the first two REM albums Murmur and Reckoning.

Lets Active was Easter’s personal project and in its time produced an EP (Afoot) prior to this album and two albums subsequent – Big Plans For Everybody and Every Dog Has Its Day. While the latter was probably the most commercially successful, Cypress is the record that interests me the most.

Cypress was a really interesting album at the time of its release. It introduced a quirky pop sound and was a definitive example of the chiming Rickenbacker guitar sound that Easter sought to master both as a producer and a recording artist.

There’s a couple of great songs on this album including Ring True, Easy Does and the urgent and deeply grooved Blue Line but the crowning glory moment is the wonderful Waters Part, a song that somehow manages to  allow ‘epic’ and ‘pop’ to be used in the same sentence. This is a song that deserves to be seen for what it is – one the high watermark moments of the whole sub genre of American indie music that included the likes of early REM, Game Theory, the dB’s, Turning Curious and Dream Syndicate.

Not every song works on Cypress – a couple of them are all sparkle and no substance and there are times when Easter’s wafer thin vocals can get annoying. Even allowing for these limitations this album is still a keeper.

It is very much of its time – a time when quirky little southern guitar bands threatened to take over indie rock. As it turns out (with the exception of REM) few of these bands ever evolved into anything more that an underground/college rock phenomenon. There’s still something charming and innocent about them though and Cypress is still worth the occasional listen today.

Mitch Easter continues to produce and perform in the Carolinas area and released a solo album Dynamico in 2008 to a good critical reaction.