Even Jesus only spent 40 days in the wilderness. Matt Sharp's solo debut is the product of four years held up in Leiper's Fork, TN, wrestling with his demons. Sure, the Son of Man's personal demon happened to be, well, the devil. But Sharp was battling Andy Warhol and 15 rapidly receding minutes of fame. Jesus went back to Galilee and was glorified by all. Sharp recorded 11 songs of desolation and loneliness, as demanding as they are sparse-- and, ultimately, as uneven.
Has it been just 10 years since we came undone for The Blue Album? Sharp played bass on that record, of course, Weezer's first, before leading quirky new-wave side project The Rentals to a bona fide hit, "Friends of P". After Pinkerton-- do I really need to mention that this was Weezer's then-overlooked sophomore outing?-- Sharp left (or was fired; details are disputed) and became a Rental full time. If a 2002 lawsuit is to be believed, Sharp co-wrote some of Weezer's best songs. But Sharp's first less-than-brilliant release, The Rentals' Seven More Minutes, is probably the last time most listeners heard anything him.
The first hints of Sharp's transmogrification from Coke-rimmed uber-geek to whiskey-soaked, lap steel-slinging lost cause came on last year's Puckett's Versus the Country Boy EP. The disc traded alt-rock for the more downcast moments from Blonde on Blonde; instead of "Visions of Johanna", Sharp gives us melancholy "Visions of Anna". Hmm. That disc's most memorable track, "Goodbye West Coast", is the only one to reappear on his self-titled full-length, and its plodding acoustic kiss-off to L.A. lifestyles really isn't as different from Phantom Planet's "California" as it would like to be.
Elsewhere, Sharp follows the example of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis, another erstwhile new waver who made an inscrutably soft, spacious solo debut. Elegiac closer "Some Days" makes use of silence and the frailties of the human voice almost as well as Hollis, while also getting off the record's best lyric: "Some days you wanna get married/ And some days you're drunk." An instrumental, "Shadows", engages in the type of ambient noise Hollis borrowed from Brian Eno.
The album's crowning achievement is "Just Like Movie Stars", which has been justly compared to Nick Drake. A better modern analogue is M. Ward, whose voice Sharp's resembles here and who layers these sorts of intricate, aching folk guitar figures as well as anyone since John Fahey. The words are appropriately cryptic, saying good night to Hollywood Blvd. far better than "Goodbye West Coast" as Sharp zooms in on a picturesque romance with the cinematic vision of classic noir. "Bells ring out from ice cream cars," he offers, going on to name-drop World War II-era Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr. It's brilliant, and it's a shame the rest of the album can't keep up.
Weezer fans hoping for a sea change to rival, uh, Beck's Sea Change will inevitably be disappointed. Though Matt Sharp's finest moments are well worth the time it takes to appreciate them, they're exceptions, not the rule. "Let Me Pass" pairs rhyming-dictionary doggerel with a "The Ballad of John & Yoko" melody on Quaaludes. Try the deliberate textures of "After the Angels" or "Watch the Weather Break" instead of NyQuil. Then again, there's always the gorgeously funereal call and response of "Before You Go", building a mausoleum out of ghostly harmonies and subtle piano. "Kiss everyone you love, everyone you know," goes the coda.
The introspective return of this former Rental is flawed as a whole, but the best two or three songs deserve the attention of anyone who finds as much beauty in the silences between painstakingly bent acoustic guitar notes as in irrepressible Moog hooks.
