The Dimes, Friday, Aug. 24

[August 22nd, 2007] [INDIE POP] A bullet destroys a soldier’s ability to sleep. A priest dies, leaving a bundle of unread confessions. A kid from New Jersey is sentenced to death. The Valentine’s Day Massacre drenches Chicago in blood.

Heavy shit. But on the Dimes’ full-length debut, The Silent Generation , the grim realities of vocalist/guitarist Johnny Clay’s lyrics blend refreshingly with dreamlike guitars and an unabashedly poppy, radio-friendly sound. The album boasts the same qualities—intricate melodies and sunny-day vocals—that have made the band’s EPs (2003’s The Dimes and ’05’s Atlanta ) and live shows standouts over the past four years. Yet here we have a darker Dimes, as the majority of the album is based on a pile of Depression-era newspapers guitarist Pierre Kaiser found while renovating his North Mississippi Avenue home. Clay, a history buff, was immediately inspired by the withered editions of the Portland Journal , and began crafting songs about their historical content. “This is where I became a storyteller,” Clay says.

The doom and gloom of this Depression-era journalism challenged Clay and the Dimes to transform real tragedy into catchy pop songs. And the local quartet has aptly taken the American tradition of happy songs about death and applied it to lucid, charging pop anthems complete with clap-along beats and considerable harmonic glee. “From the third-person perspective, you can write a happy song about a guy being executed,” says Clay. “I’m the kid on the corner saying, ‘Extra! Extra!’ and trying to sell newspapers.”

Clay, Kaiser, bassist Ryan Johnston and drummer Jake Rahner have also solidified themselves in Portland’s indie scene with constant performances—for good or ill. “We’ve always played a lot,” notes Kaiser. “But we had a ‘no gig is too shitty’ attitude. We even played ice cream shops.” But the foursome’s relentless attitude has kept it touring the Northwest steadily. And between gigging and tragedy-mining, the band found time to self-produce The Silent Generation, which will be available exclusively at shows starting this Saturday (a national release is scheduled for later this year).

Although it’s a tad morbid to whistle along to a song about a dead priest or a troubled solider, the Dimes have crafted an intelligent, often whimsical album that caters to its predetermined pop sound perfectly. Kaiser says the band is realizing that sometimes making music is about enjoying your creativity: “This is the first time we’ve written about characters rather than our lives,” he explains. “We’ve created an alternate world within our music, and we’re having fun with it.” .