Actionslacks: The Scene’s Out of Sight

I’ve gone down this hole more than once. In this case, I made my way back to this album — one that I ordered via the mail (!) from Self-Starter Foundation as part of a package with one or more Les Savy Fav CDs back in 2001. I honestly don’t recall if ordering a second or third item saved me on some shipping, or how I decided to purchase The Scene’s Out of Sight, but there it was. And there it is. Sorry, I was saying that I found my way back to this record through their bassist on this album, Aaron Rubin — despite the fact Aaron Rubin isn’t listed as the bassist on this record on the actual CD sleeve, but does show up in the “thank yous”. He apparently produced Wavves’ 2025 album, Spun, which I happened to be listening to and wondered who the producer was on it. I don’t know, the world of music and the Internet is crazy.

Just to add to the interesting facts here, the producer on this album is J. Robbins. He of the bands Jawbox and Burning Airlines, among others, and producer extraordinaire. I would say that this Actionslacks sound isn’t exactly his bag. Or his typical genre. Though if ears could squint, you can kind of hear it. I’ve categorized this thing as indie pop, because it’s just a little to clean and soft to be categorized as indie rock and a little too low-key to be power pop or pop punk. This is how I make decisions, and I realize it’s mostly stupid and arbitrary. Music is music and trying to pigeonhole it is tough.

What’s also tough is starting your album with what is clearly its best track. Which also happens to be the name of the record. Talk about blowing your wad! Yes, “The Scene if Out of Sight” is a song that has that energy, that dynamism, that sound that feels a bit more J. Robbins than the rest of the tracks. And it is immaculately produced. It’s louder and more cacophonous, but a controlled little package of adult-oriented pop punk that belies the songs that come after it. From there the production remains strong, but the songs sometimes lapse into mid-tempo vanilla-ness and truly paint-by-numbers musicality. This was dropped in January of 2001, and the landscape obviously changed later that year, but the cheeriness of this thing aged poorly. The lyrics are almost embarrassingly simplistic. You can anticipate every single rhyme in every song, as if the writer had a rhyming dictionary handy. It’s too early for AI, but it has that tinge.

There are a few songs that veer into Cake territory, which is problematic when you’re not Cake. There are even some songs that remind me a little bit of the latter-day, 2000 Jets to Brazil album, Four Cornered Night. Which could be a good thing based on the band, but that record suffers from a lot of that turn-of-the-century malaise that seemed to affect former and current rock bands across the board. They thought about the beginning of the 2000s and felt some need to mature or be sadly reflective about the new century. They were not partying like it was 1999; they were crying that they were entering a new era as broke-ass indie rockers in a dying genre. Not Actionslacks, though. No, they were channeling some Joe Jackson vagaries and clearly hoping that the industry would turn their way as it did for Third Eye Blind in 1997 and 1998. Spoiler: it did not.