Ç TOP 50 ALBUMS OF THE DECADE: 10-6 | Main | BEST ALBUM OF THE DECADE #4: ARCADE FIRE - FUNERAL È
January 19, 2010
BEST ALBUM OF THE DECADE #5: CLEM SNIDE - YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC
(FYI: This album might have actually been released in 1999 - according to the Wikipedia anyway. If you care about this, let me know and I'll mail you an apology sometime before my best of the 2010s list)
Nothing about Eef Barzelay, or the band he acts as an almost non-existent primary factor of, the rotating entity called Clem Snide is fairly original. Eef is a poet of melancholy, as were many others, and his band plays something between Alt-Country and standard Indie-Rock - this very fair Pitchfork review says so, and it's right. The band is neither particularly innovate or interesting in terms of what its been doing in a period when bands hop to the forefront by being innovate and interesting. Which is why you may not have heard of YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC, my favorite Clem Snide album (BTW, Pitchfork gave this a hyperbolically bad 2.1, saying it "begs for laugh tracks").
If Bob Dylan's melancholy was contrived to sound original, Eef's is so original it sounds contrived. When he sings, "Tonight we're going to party like its 1989," he reminds listeners like me that he participated in the same pop cultural phenomenons, and has been just as disappointed in them as harbingers of the exciting new era they were supposed to bring. 1989 had the Berlin Wall falling, and yet it was still kind of boring - there are things going on here that you might at first scoff at; like Clem Snide is being funny in the same way everyone else is. But they aren't.
THE GHOST OF FASHION, the album that followed, largely eschewed the somber melodies of this album and was their most critically and commercially popular - it featured the opening credits song to the cult-TV hit ED, but it was scrapped for the Foo Fighters song from the first season. GHOST rocks a little harder. I like listening to it, along with 2003's SOFT SPOT and 2005's END OF LOVE. But YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC combines both intimate sadness with Eef's recognition that he has to explain it. "Your Favorite Music," the title track only "makes you sad" - this is as trenchant an explanation as Nick Hornby's opening question from HIGH FIDELITY (paraphrased): "What came first, the music or the misery? Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or Am I miserable because I listen to pop music?"
I wrote an unsuccessful statement of purpose for grad school around Eef's transcendent "I Love the Unknown," a loose narrative about a guy who quits the job his dad gave him, refuses to love the girl who loves him, rides buses to nowhere, and tells a psychiatrist that he's afraid of "going through life feeling numb." And when he tells us in "Messiah Complex Blues" that "I wouldn't die for your sins," it's at once a rejection of faith and an endorsement of the idea of a Messiah. Nobody working in popular music has dealt with issues of faith and spirituality like Barzelay; as a cultural commentator, he's incisive without making each song a polemic. It's a shame Johnny Cash died before he could cover "Messiah Complex Blues" (or a number of CS songs; my dream album would be AMERICA V: CASH COVERS CLEM SNIDE).
Maybe, like the "favorite music" to which the title indicates, this album is supposed to make you sad. But it ends up always making me feel like I have a fellow traveler, someone who can't really articulate what's going on, but wants to bring the night alive with laughs, as he suggests as an anecdote to the awful party in "1989." I suppose everyone doesn't want to spend time with that guy, who realizes that the party isn't any fun but anticipates making fun of it later. He's kind of like that "Debby Downer" character from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but I think you can see that mixed in a with a desire for something awesome, something "unknown," that creaks out from behind the sad violins and ironic horns. You feel like you know him.
So there's one last shoutout for my favorite band who no one has heard of.
| By Andytown | 1:07 PM
Comments
i have been unable to get "my favourite music", i'm a big clem snide fan but living in peru doesn't make it really easy. do you know how i can get it? amazon isn't being helpful
Posted by: nurit at February 9, 2010 2:48 PM
hey nurit; it's on lala - you have to sign up but you can stream it online for free there. also on itunes, i'm pretty sure.
glad to know i have a "following" in peru :)
Posted by: andytown at February 9, 2010 11:48 PM