Besides being a character in a
William S. Burroughs novel, Clem Snide is a band, a funny and
touching alt-countrified/indie-rock band whose frontman and
singer/songwriter, Eef Barzelay, is often accused of being too
clever for his own good. For many music fans — especially
those passionately invested in their own sense of uniqueness
— cleverness is a sign of insincerity, which is a sign of
inauthenticity, which is kinda like irony, which is, like, so over,
dude. It’s not the madding Clear Channel crowd that worries
about who’s pretentious and who’s for real; it’s
the self-conscious, self-doubting self-identified hipsters, who
presume that all their preferences are an extension of their
multifaceted, irreducible selves. Barzelay, who recently moved from
Trendyville (a.k.a. Brooklyn, N.Y.) to Tackytown (a.k.a. Nashville,
Tenn.) has got to be pretty sick of those types himself, and who
could blame him? Few flaws are so irritating, so easily satirized,
as the ones you recognize in yourself. “Emma Bovary,” Flaubert
admitted, “c’est moi.”
End of Love, Clem
Snide’s fifth full-length, begins and ends with a song about
poseurs. Underneath the surface mockery, however, is a deep and
abiding sympathy, a generosity of spirit that refuses to succumb to
despair. The title track, a jangly guitar-pop anthem, pokes fun at
people who revel in their own unhappiness: “Guess what? Your
pain’s been done to perfection by everyone/And the first
thing every killer reads is Catcher in
the Rye.” By the end of the song,
though, the scathing indictments have given way to something more
meaningful, and a chorus of cheerful horns underscores the parting
shot of poignant optimism: “You might as well release the
doves/Because no one will survive the end of love.” The
closing song, “Weird,” is another salvo against
isolating narcissism: “So what if your mother found God and
your dad likes to drink/You’re not as weird as you’d
like me to think.”
Barzelay wrote the 11 songs on the album after
the death of his mother-in-law, as his own mother was dying of
cancer; unsurprisingly, most are meditations on mortality that document
the search for meaning in an absurd, painful universe. “For me,
this record is about failing triumphantly,” he says in the press
kit accompanying the release — an oxymoron that perfectly
captures End of Love’s biting buoyancy.
From 2000 to 2003, Petra Haden
sporadically recorded an a capella version of the Who’s 1967
high-concept classic The Who Sell Out. Haden, one of jazz bassist Charlie Haden’s
triplet daughters, was encouraged in this quixotic endeavor by
another legendary bassist, her friend Mike Watt (Minutemen,
fIREHOSE), who was curious to see what Haden, a self-confessed Who
neophyte who didn’t even own the original album, would do
with one of his all-time fave raves. He loaned her a Tascam 488
eight-track recorder, with side one of the original on track eight
of one cassette and side two on another, and encouraged her to sing
along until she filled up the remaining tracks.
Gamely, Haden did her best to reproduce all of
the instruments, right down to the mock commercials between songs.
Her impressive but never showy range and her childlike enthusiasm
for this deeply goofy project keep her rendition of Sell Out from being the
novelty one might expect. Although it’s impossible not to
smile when listening to her vocal approximations of Pete
Townshend’s virtuosic riffage, John Entwistle’s
thunderous counterpoint, and Keith Moon’s divine hammer, the
smile never turns into a smirk. Who purists might shudder, but
there’s something redemptive in the radical reinterpretation
of a canonical work. Without the risk of travesty, tribute is
impossible.
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2005.
