Over the course of five albums and many peripheral releases, Toronto-born Max Turnbull has fashioned himself an outsider narrative as Slim Twig. It’s true that 2009’s slimy sample-heavy Contempt! wasn't about to find a mainstream audience, though the crux of his self-styled myth hangs on Paper Bag rejecting 2012’s A Hound at the Hem for being too far out, which feels off when you consider the rest of their roster. Compared to his previous records, Hound was Slim’s most accessible release: A concept album loosely themed around Lolita and L’Histoire de Melody Nelson that conjured L.A.’s chamber pop weirdos Van Dyke Parks, Harry Nilsson, and Randy Newman in a dank, oily guise. Owen Pallett provided string arrangements. Slim eventually issued the record on Calico Corp, the label he runs with his wife, U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy, and DFA Records saw fit to re-release it last year. They offered Slim a deal for new work, and encouraged him to "keep the music as weird as possible." In the meantime, he had released the milder Sof Sike to appease Paper Bag, a compromise he says he didn’t mind.
For all Slim’s off-kilter aims, Thank You for Stickin’ With Twig fits right into any number of very timely pop cultural concerns. His desire to emulate and kill his idols—audibly Zappa, Beefheart, the Zombies—paired with an abiding love of classic melodies and psychedelic murk aligns him with self-conscious, costumed rock’n’roll stylists like Father John Misty and Ariel Pink. Both FJM and Pink use bad taste and misogyny in an attempt to radicalize the traditional realms in which they work, and are credited as complex artists for it, though, as NPR’s Ann Powers highlighted in a recent essay on Josh Tillman, it’s a marketing ploy as much as any potentially genuine creative impulse: "Maybe for that reason, outrageousness now doesn’t seek to change much beyond itself. It’s provocative, but not necessarily oppositional or even that unconventional at its core."
With Thank You, Slim rejects FJM and Pink’s rejection of good taste, positioning himself as an ally on gender and wage equality, a woman’s pleasure, and an advocate for "dragging an appropriation of rock’n’roll kicking and screaming into a place free of cliché, sexism, and trod on association." It’s a big claim. And yet, Slim appointing himself as a corrective sits almost as uncomfortably as Pink’s "maced by a feminist" story and FJM's cultivated chauvinism. Pitchfork contributor Jes Skolnik wrote recently about "[recoiling] from men who are extremely keen to tell me exactly how Feminist they are." She continued, "[trust is] not something that comes with hardcore lyrics about the Right Topics." Given that Slim has talked about admiring "a lot of artists who would be considered assholes or even criminals like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Phil Spector," it’s hard not to raise a skeptical brow at his foregrounded activism on behalf of the disenfranchised.
Thank You comes at a time when we greet any art that basically musters the Bechdel test with the enthusiasm of serfs receiving crumbs from the master’s table. Type "Magic Mike female pleasure" into your favorite search engine and there’s a whole page of essays from high-profile outlets praising the film’s portrayal of women’s satisfaction. This is where Thank You starts, with "Slippin’ Slidin’", a desperate, sleazy devotional where Slim puts himself at the mercy of his sexual partner, his distorted voice matching the guitar’s gravelly thrust. That it sounds like Queens of the Stone Age covering T. Rex is surely meant to make some audacious point about a cock-rocking song concerning female pleasure, a level of extra-textural interest that Thank You assumes of its listeners. (Cop the extensive explanations that accompany its page in the DFA web store.)
Better is the subsequent "A Woman’s Touch (It’s No Coincidence)"—co-written with Remy—which confronts Yoko haters and attributes the Beatles’ wives with significant responsibility for their husbands’ success. This feels like a well-judged feminist statement coming from a male artist messing with rock’n’roll signifiers. It also sounds like a dub remix of the "Roobarb and Custard" theme tune that’s as irritating as it is fun. Also strong is "Fog of Sex (N.S.I.S.)"—if it were less corroded, its sharp lyrics might forge an anthem for gender fluidity: "Gender please/ Standardized questionnaire fee/ Simply mark which one you are/ Yet no option applies to me," Slim sings with Remy.
"A Woman’s Touch" and "Fog of Sex" are the opening book-end to a bog of courtly baroque interludes ("She Stickin’ With Twig"), twisted junkyard carousel songs ("Stone Rollin’ (Musical Emotion)"), doomy stutter ("Trip Thru Bells"), and drawling electric guitar that magically captures the gleeful menace of Captain Beefheart’s voice ("Textiles on Mainstreet"; see also). Everything is doused in unkempt psych sleaze; the middle section is in desperate need of a corset.
Amidst it is "Roll Red Roll (Song for Steubenville)". It starts as a murky waltz that veers again into that louche guitar tone, heralding inaudible lyrics that evoke the grim situation of the Steubenville high school football team rape case—all uneasy come-ons that don’t contain the option to say no: "You ever been a mule hon?/ You ever make it past the line?/ Even in a school zone/ I see you look just fine." Perhaps Slim has very personal reasons for wanting to inhabit this horrendous incident, but at the same time, the lyrics don’t convey a complex handle on its gravity. The only nod to Steubenville is in the title, which feels like another pat on his own back; outrageousness—masquerading as tribute—not seeking to change much beyond itself, again.
The empty Big Ideas continue: "You Got Me Goin..." features a slurped sample of the Chi-Lites’ "Stoned Out of My Mind", which is rekindled again later on "Out of My Mind", with added woodwind. Following the genuinely clever and brilliant Hound, the mess is wildly frustrating. "The trouble is once having killed one’s idols, there’s a tendency to also do away with melody, structure, clever lyrics, and a more ambitious approach to production," Slim told one interviewer of his attempts to avoid doing that. He wasn't particularly successful. It’s no surprise that he named the supreme self-sabotage that was Julian Casablancas and the Voidz’ Tyranny as one of his albums of 2014.
Perversely, the song where Slim confronts the tension between himself and his dearly held inspirations is both the least original and best of Thank You. The jaunty, confident guitar hook of "Live In, Live On, Your Era" evokes both the Stones’ "Rocks Off" and Bowie’s "Rebel Rebel", and sails through proggy patches as Slim delivers acutely written lyrics about the vital challenge of originality: "This ain’t the time to be cribbing in class/ One’s own voice is a great deal rarer/ With that in mind, start living out your era." As if to make—or break?—his point, he follows it and closes the record with a hoary cover of Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier’s "Cannabis". "On and on, the jokes and meta-sonic rock commentary continue like so many Zappa-esque indulgences," state the notes that accompany the album. But in Slim Twig’s incessant and overbearing winks to the camera, he’s lost sight of his own potential.
