Eef Barzelay’s solo debut is
exactly that: a solo album, consisting entirely of one measly voice
and one measly acoustic guitar (well, almost — one very short
track also features a bit of ambient bird chatter). Stripped down
to the barest of essentials, Bitter
Honey may lack some of the verve and
variety that characterized Barzelay’s work with Clem Snide,
the band he’s fronted since 1991, but the ultraminimalist
instrumentation focuses the listener’s attention on the
singer/songwriter’s trump card. Most Clem Snide fans are
lyrics people anyway, people who think it’s perfectly fine
and not at all pretentious when some bespectacled indie-rock dude
names his band after a character in a William S. Burroughs novel or
comes up with a song title such as “Joan Jett of Arc.”
Members of Barzelay’s demographic market read McSweeney’s and
wear itty-bitty T-shirts with ironic slogans; a dearth of hott lixx
won’t harsh their buzz one bit. Given the priorities of Barzelay’s
geekbase, the album’s austerity would seem at first to be a
big plus. His reedy, adenoidal voice cuts through the mellow
six-string strum like a tonic, harsh but pleasantly stimulating;
every word is perfectly decipherable without the need for a lyric
booklet. Moreover, the strongest songs rank among his very best.
“The Ballad of Bitter Honey,” a four-verse life lesson
told from the perspective of a rap-video starlet, is as hilarious
as it is heartbreaking: “That was my ass you saw
bouncin’ next to Ludacris/It was only on screen for a second,
but it’s kinda hard to miss/And all those other hoochie
skanks, they ain’t got s**t on me/And one of Nelly’s
bodyguards, he totally agreed.” “Words That Escape
Me” dissects a lover’s complicated emotional state,
that seldom-discussed mixture of masochism, narcissism, fear, and
aggression: “Sometimes I wish you would die/Just to see
how I would look/By the ambulance light with a grief-stricken face/And
the thought that we’ve never been closer.” Bitter Honey’s
sparseness is a double-edged sword, however, exposing
Barzelay’s weaknesses in addition to his strengths.
Eventually the album begins to sound somewhat monotonous, and
it’s probably a good thing that it clocks in at just over 30
minutes. The guitar accompaniment is competent, if seldom flashy
(the Tejano-tinged “Let Us Be Naked” being a lovely
exception), but it’s not enough to distract the listener from
the occasional missteps. Couplets such as “If I’m to
escape from this/From you I will need a kiss” and
“Nothing is real since you kissed me/A-floating away we shall
be” are hard to ignore when so little else is happening. For
a lyricist of his caliber to strain the conventions of syntax and
idiom just to eke out a dumb rhyme borders on unforgivable, and his
fans, many of whom have probably done time in creative-writing
workshops, are sure to cringe. Fortunately, however, the gems outweigh the
gaffes, and these short stories in the form of folk songs have a
shambling grace that ultimately redeems them. I’ve never
understood critics who complain that Barzelay is too clever by
half, too crippled by hipsterdom to relate to normal, sincere
people who, you know, actually feel stuff. On the contrary, he
strikes me as almost pathologically sentimental, whether he’s
singing about the existential braveness of a bootylicious hustler,
the fragile innocence of a child, or a drunken hookup gone wrong.
To be sure, his meticulous craftsmanship is always apparent, which
might offend those who believe that the only genuine art is
completely spontaneous, if not anti-intellectual. But as the poet
Marvin Bell once said, “art is the refuge of our
helplessness.” Barzelay, who has probably read him, would no
doubt agree.
This article appears in Mar 9-15, 2006.
