My Dad, like many fathers all over the world, owns a dinky VHS-C camcorder. In his intensely pragmatic way, he sees no need to operate without auto-focus and isn't keen on re-framing, working the zoom, or dealing with white balance. Still, his immobile home videos, consisting of long-takes unintentionally akin to Bill Viola's I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, are compelling for their sheer boredom: they make you question how you're spending (or misspending) your time. That's a high-minded consideration of home video as cultural artifact when, really, they're just fucking boring.
On their second full-length, ponderously titled The Networks, The Circuits, The Streams, The Harmonies, New York City's Burnside Project-- a straightforward indie rock group dabbling in electronics-- attempt to spice-up run-of-the-mill songwriting with hip/trip-hop beats and cricket chirps. Beats are corporeal; even if you aren't paying attention you can end up tapping your toe, or at best shaking your ass. Here, that's certainly the case: while the electronic bed adds three-dimensionality, the songs themselves, minus these accouterments, are encyclopedia entries for harmless college rock circa 1988.
Beyond the tepid compositional skeletons, Burnside's lyrics stand-out as the main hurdle; vocalist and songwriter Richard Jankovich's attempt at Malkmus-esque punning falls flat repeatedly. As he drops a ton of pop culture detritus, I can feel him winking, nodding, and holding his fingers up in mock quotation marks. In "Assessing Your Performance" he resorts to "No matter what you say/ Say it don't spray it"; "Repeat After Me" hinges on the wordplay of a curious two year old: "You pass the rest with flying colors/ But can colors really fly?" Jankovich's singsong delivery plays like spoken word from the uptight fiction manager at your local Barnes & Noble, a pallid version of Barenaked Ladies for fans of NPR and The New Yorker. Better yet, it's the Eels gone electro, the aftermath of smoking too much herb and re-naming their cat MIDI.
It isn't a blasphemy. This is not an entirely awful record; it starts off fine with "He Never Knew The Benefits Of Caffeine" a catchy-enough take on digital surveillance and technological overload. The second track "Cure The Pulse To Begin" features The Mendoza Line's Shannon McArdle on background vocals, transforming the otherwise anonymous club-kid drum clatter into a tepid Lali Puna impression. Notably, I made it through "Only Ordinary"-- the one track sung entirely by McArdle-- without wanting to call the cheese police, but even that number was way too similar to "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand". And-- I never thought I'd say this - Primitive Radio Gods do it better.
Outside that pair of tolerable moments, the center of this record slips under the weight of too many sketchy word choices. "Heavy Mettle" comes off like Beat Poetry for fans of Pete and Pete; in "Foreign Exchange", Schoolhouse Rocks is passed off as pained electronica: "If the mirror lies then who can you trust?/ The painting on the wall is so full of torture/ Indigo, yellow, ultra violet/ Paint by numbers, count with me." To hear scratching in this context, it's like watching my grandfather do the human beatbox to Dead Prez, and sadly, it just keeps going. Ultimately, Jankovich's fascination with one-liners reminds me of a bad waiter at TGI Friday's, trying to charm a table of girls with his sunny reenactment of Slacker "Because it changed my life, friend. You want freedom fries with that?"
In addition to Shannon McArdle, the thirteen tracks also feature contributions from Hub Moore, who's lent his vocals to Hal Hartley films; Jonny Cohen, members of Elk City, and Bar/None label owner-operator Glenn Morrow also drop by. The hyperbolic I-am-Allan-Ginsberg-writing-opaque-stuff-for-Dylan's-Desire liner notes were penned by novelist and Feelies fan Rick Moody under the pseudonym "Tyrone Duffy"-- Moody wrote the notes as a song-by-song response to the album, and, per usual, he likes to hear himself write:
"Get your camera obscura, construct the boys in the loft with the baseball games on even if they don't actually exist except as an image entity, because isn't hurting no one, and these frames construct a filmstrip about a dog's lungs and car crashes and the sixteen decisions, and, man, that's an uplifter. Listen to the words, as the mighty river flows past."
Burnside Project's one-page mentions that their songs may show up on MTV's The Real World and Road Rules; that they're so excited to be "optioned" by these shows is indicative of their intent: as the barely audible background blip for one or two vanilla conversations between badly adjusted, over-privileged roommates, it makes perfect sense. Still, that press byte is a sad reminder that these guys believe in what they're doing-- for all the blundering wordplay, this is more than a joke to the Burnside Project: don't let them weasel out of their bad punchlines with "You just don't get it." We do, guys-- we just don't like it.
