Barenaked Ladies Are Me
If the albums get much longer, this isn’t going to work very well. Below is the review graph for the most recent snoozer from Barenaked Ladies, Barenaked Ladies are Me (BLAM). As you can see, it’s solidly mediocre with one high point in the middle surrounded by the album’s weakest songs.
Given a map like the above, it’s no wonder this album has been sitting on my iPod for several months without me paying much attention to it. It’s not that the music is bad, it’s just that most of the songs fail to make an impression. BNL is at their best when they’re doing quirky, satirical, or bitter music. Gordon, their first and strongest album, is full of these. Unfortunately, judging from the albums, they seem to have been running away from that genre most of their career.
I look at the album in more detail after the jump.
When I listen to an album I tend to respond first to the musical arrangement and then later to the lyrics. Unfortunately the lyrics are often unrewarding, repeating other BNL songs.
BLAM adds a few with slightly more mature twists. “Bank Job” starts out sounding like a bad-relationship whine but morphs into a song about a failed bank job apparently masterminded by a business motivational speaker. The reason the heist fails is perhaps too cute by half, but still — a nifty idea.
“Everything Hand Changed” is somewhat self-absorbed, but it’s lifted out of the rest of the album by the musical arrangement, violin, and buttonbox.
On the path of life, I wish you well
Divergent journeys, but we will meet again in Hell
I kept my head down and moved on
Til every friend I’d known was gone
“Wind it Up,” with its arena-rock guitars and harmonies, is an excellent old-school kiss-off rocker. Unfortunately, BNL has definitely worn a rut in this thematic ground. It also features this strange, opaque, and discomfiting insult:
I was a baby when I learned to suck
But you have raised it to an art form
That invokes a lot of images, none of them particularly compatible with each other.
“Running Out of Ink” — a song about romantic failure and writer’s block — discards the tortured rhymes in favor of tortured metaphor. Again, fine musical organization but lyrically wobbly:
Could song be an alibi
A lyric replacement for falling in love
But now that the well is dry
I can’t understand what I’ve been singing of.
“Alibi” seems misused in this context, but “placebo” doesn’t rhyme with “dry,” I suppose.
“Take It Back” is a protest song with little courage. Despite a nice turn of phrase or two –
Long lines and warning signs
Think of all the lives saved by plastic knives
It’s naive, but make-believe
We will never lose if we remove our shoes
– it does an excellent job demonstrating the truth of another verse: “It’s hard to keep your mouth shut / harder still to make noise.”
“Angry People” is a rousing, sarcastic political half-ska towards the end of the album. It’s not so much a protest song as a song about political activism. A meta-protest song, if you will. It’s opaque enough to be the anthem of both the left and the right political blogosphere (depending on who’s winning at the moment):
In a square, a thousand angry people
Are waving signs in the air
While a million other happy people
Are trying hard not to care
You see, the happy people’s biggest problem
Is they’re never fearing the worst
While the rest of us will never sleep until
Your happy bubbles are burst
The song straddles more than one fence, hiding behind sarcasm and self-criticism. But then, you recall that it’s “harder still to make noise,” and I suppose BNL is not quite up to the task. Nevertheless, this is my favorite song on the album. It’s got a beat and you can protest to it.
Despite multiple listenings, the other fourteen songs have pretty much failed to make an impression, so much so that the song name doesn’t jog my memory in the slightest. There are two exceptions.
“Peterborough and the Kawarthas” has a madding twee pop-hook that will become an unpleasant addition to the terrible tunes stuck in your head for no good reason. It’s a song about leaving a child behind (divorce? going on tour? who knows), and while I appreciate the sentiment the lyrics are pretty saccharine.
I’m going early, won’t wave goodbye
Tell him I love him; look him in the eye
I’ve learned how to mourn; I’ve learned how to miss
Let me disappear with this kiss
“Rule the World with Love” is a protest song as well, but so cloaked in the language of optimistic hippy leftwing folkcrap I missed it:
It didn’t happen to us overnight
Just cause it happened doesn’t mean it’s right
To our embarrassment we lost the fight
To rule the world with love
It was the first song of the album to get booted off my player, despite the fact that I agree with its general point.
In the end, out of twenty tracks only six score above the half-point mark. One might be inclined to assume a stronger album might have been within reach if the weaker members had just been culled from the pack, but BNL seems to have been trying to overwhelm listeners with the album’s, ahem, thud factor. Or delivery methods — BNL seems eager to try out alternate delivery methods to CDs, BLAM comes in many flavors with several different track listings. There’s digital downloads from a variety of stores, collectors editions, even a USB memory stick — each with exclusive and bonus tracks, making a cohesive album experience difficult and giving collectors heartburn.
A little less time spent on marketing innovation and a little more time spent on editing and crafting would probably have done wonders. Instead, there’s just the same stuff we’ve been hearing for the last six albums — just more of it.
