The Life Ironic With Eef Barzelay-- Clem Snide Celebrates the End of Love.
Written: May 23 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: many
Cons: easy to pinpoint, tricky but ultimately possible to reconcile.
The Bottom Line: Fill The Bottom Line with your light, and The Bottom Line will not make a sound.
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| omophagia's Full Review: End Of Love [Digipak] - Clem Snide |
Irony is corrosive.
Those were the three words with which my college creative writing professor opened his final comments to me at the conclusion of our semester-long seminar, and they are perhaps the single-most significant, influential words of the entirety of my undergraduate education. This was not a comment meant exclusively as negative criticism, but, instead, as more of a warning of the lasting implications of a mindset defined by distance. It was a warning of which I took heed only after extensive self-reflection, and it certainly made me a better writer and, ultimately, a more confident and assertive individual. Three words, but my, they're loaded.
The idea behind this statement is that irony is something of an all-or-nothing proposition, a William Blake type conflict between innocence and experience wherein the boundary separating the two states is penetrable only once and only in one direction. This type of binary serves as the foundation for the deconstructionist philosophical movement popularized by Jacques Derrida, and, if perhaps too reductive to function fully as an overall worldview-- though there are some situations (education, sexual experience) to which it productively applies-- it remains an intellectually rigorous "in" for the discussion of any work of art created in the post-modern and now in the post-postmodern age. Once a writer delves into irony as a literary device, it is all but impossible to approach any of his or her subsequent works without the skepticism required to strip away irony's artifice to find greater meaning. The use of irony corrodes the work.
In popular music-- "popular," at least in the indie-rock sense of the word-- one of the best case studies of the lasting implications of irony is Clem Snide, the alt-country band fronted by Eef Barzelay. Considering that Clem Snide's only real flirtation with commercial success was with an oddball country ballad titled, "Joan Jett of Arc," and that one of their studio releases is an EP centered around a punk-leaning but straight-faced cover of Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful," theirs is a body of work most often defined by its complicated relationship with irony. And the latest full-length album by Clem Snide, End of Love, is no exception.
Eef Barzelay-- he, of possibly the greatest all-time rock-star name-- makes music much in the way that Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) makes movies: his humor is both intelligent and absurd, and it toes the line separating the ironic from the sincere. Working in Anderson's favor is that film is a more inherently "literary" medium than is popular music-- a two-hour screenplay simply offers more space for interpretive maneuvers than does a three-minute pop song, allowing a smart filmmaker like Anderson to overcome whatever ironic distance he or she may have intentionally created in order to mine a greater depth of genuine pathos. Even for a smart songwriter like Barzelay, then, the proposition is a more difficult one-- using an overall coherence of artistic vision to overcome the irony inherent in lines like, "She takes me down south / With Hall & Oates in her mouth / My first love, my Joan Jett of Arc."
Over the course of their five full length releases, that's an obstacle Barzelay and his band have overcome with mixed success. And the corrosive power of their well-executed irony was most evident on their previous album, 2003's Soft Spot, which explored Barzelay's uneasy move into fatherhood. Soft Spot was an album that, were the listener unfamiliar with any of Clem Snide's previous work, would sound unabashed in its sincerity and all the richer for the simplicity of that sincerity's expression. Ay, but there's the rub. Was Soft Spot really sincere, or was it the work of a chronic smarta$s doing his best approximation of sincerity? It's impossible to say.
End of Love, Clem Snide's latest release, succeeds largely because it avoids that kind of difficulty thanks to an impressive degree of thematic coherence. The album finds Barzelay using his gift of irony-- corrosive or not, it still counts as a legitimate brand of talent-- to the peak of his skill, and it's a point of view well-matched by the nihilism at the core of End of Love's eleven songs. The refrain of the title track has Barzelay triumphantly proclaiming, "Maybe we should just release the doves / Because no one will survive the end of love" with the kind of clear-eyed certainty that firmly puts to rest any doubts raised by the irony itself. This is a bleak album, to be sure, but Barzelay asks why he should sacrifice a sense of humor when faced with the end times.
Humor, of course, is a tricky proposition in and of itself, and whether or not any given listener will respond well to End of Love depends largely on his or her reaction to lines like, "And the pedophiles did their rendition of 'You've Got a Friend' / And everyone had to admit that it wasn't half bad / But they still felt uneasy, feeling they'd be dismissed as a fad" from "Collapse," or "You make me wanna soak it in gasoline / Stain my new shirt / Sip Lysol from a cup / So clean, it hurts" from "Something Beautiful." Individual mileage may vary, lest anyone mistake a single endorsement for a sign of universal appeal. For fans of absurd imagery, offbeat juxtapositions, random pop-culture references, and the occasional bad pun, however, End of Love offers no shortage of first-rate lyrical gems.
Indicative is the highpoint of the album, the pair of songs "Jews for Jesus Blues" and "God Answers Back," an audacious call-and-response stunt that rightfully shouldn't work but which evokes genuine spiritual disquiet. "I was searching for something I could not describe / So I stared at the Son until the tears filled my eyes / I thought I was empty, so I paid the cost / But now that I'm found, I miss being lost," Barzelay laments in the opening stanza of "Jews for Jesus Blues," only to have God respond one track hence with, "You'd better pray you never wake up / To find your dreams have all come true / Cause if you get everything you hoped for / Then I will have to punish you / I need you just as much as you need / Me and the flower-loving bees / Your blood will color every sunset / And your tears will help me grow some trees." It's on these tracks that Barzelay best illustrates how an excellent songwriter can overcome irony-- the songs work because they aren't clever simply for the sake of being clever. The approach may be irreverent, but the songs are built upon a fundamental respect for the bigger questions that drive them.
Ultimately, it's that respect for his own ideas that allows Barzelay to emerge from the shroud of his irony. He's self-deprecating enough to laugh at his own shortcomings, but he also doesn't apologize for the ambition that reveals those shortcomings. End of Love engages because it embraces nihilism rather than a base cynicism, and the result is an album that isn't as thematically off-putting as its title might otherwise suggest.
As for the album's overall sound, Clem Snide have always skewed to the farthest "alt" end of the alt-country continuum, and End of Love follows in that vein. Clem Snide qualifies as a country band largely on the compact structures upon which Barzelay builds his songs and for the occasional use of steel guitar, as on lead single "Fill Me With Your Light" and also "Jews for Jesus Blues," and brushed snares. Clem Snide is very much an indie-rock band, though End of Love's production is undeniably spit-polished and shimmering, and even at their most straightforwardly country, they rarely cross the line into the twang that many rock music fans find so unbearable.
If there's any aspect of Clem Snide's sound that might strike some listeners as aversive, it's Barzelay's voice, a unique instrument that's both clear and immediate in a way that's an appropriately disarming complement to his lyrics. Like Aimee Mann or Rufus Wainwright, he has a tendency to sing into the correct pitch rather than hitting it outright, but he's still possessed of a voice that only makes Clem Snide sound that much more unlike anyone else currently recording today.
Again, Barzelay's closest artistic parallel isn't another musician; it's a highly-regarded but dense and tricky young filmmaker. And, for better or worse, much of the discussion surrounding the films of Wes Anderson involves the term "post-ironic." With End of Love, like Anderson's best work, Clem Snide finally explores the world beyond irony's limitations, rather than adhering to them or allowing them to corrode their work beyond all meaningful recognition.
Eef Barzelay's answer to the corrosive influence of irony is a cock-eyed optimism: it's the apocalypse, so why not release the doves? And it both inscribes End of Love with a fascinatingly convoluted but ultimately coherent internal logic and makes End of Love one of 2005's most compelling releases.
Album Specs:
End of Love, Clem Snide.
SpinArt 156.
02/22/2005.
All songs by Eef Barzelay.
01. "End of Love," 3:52.
02. "Collapse," 4:42.
03. "Fill Me With Your Light," 4:47.
04. "The Sound of German Hip-Hop," 5:11.
05. "Tiny European Cars," 3:21.
06. "Jews for Jesus Blues," 2:43.
07. "God Answers Back," 3:04.
08. "Something Beautiful," 4:42.
09. "Made for TV Movie," 3:24.
10. "When We Become," 5:17.
11. "Weird," 3:11.
For Fans Of: eels, Fountains of Wayne, Old 97s, Tom Waits, Jim White, Modest Mouse, Wilco.
Recommended:
Yes
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omophagia
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