Last spring, someone sent me a frankly despicable novel by Chris Batchelder called Bear v. Shark. Like a lot of novels lately, it was set in a not-too-distant future where people's lives are so entangled with pointless consumerism and cable infotainment (and the all-consuming spectacle of a robotic bear fighting a robotic shark) that they're largely unable to have profitable relationships with one another beyond languid discussions of same. You've heard this complaint before: everything increasingly mediated and branded, less and less of our emotional lives untouched by commerce and commentary. From the early 70s to the mid-80s this still seemed like an important issue to address, but at this late date it looks bankrupt and repugnant: if Batchelder's complaint is that we should have something more "meaningful" in our lives, surely his job is to quit fretting over the cable box and figure out what that thing might be. He can blame it on consumerism and sporting spectacles all he wants-- the central point of Bear v. Shark remains that its own author can't give us the very thing he's claiming we need.
I say all this to explain what's so special about "Bulk Removal Truck", a track on Franklin Bruno's new record, A Cat May Look at a Queen. Bruno started his career with the word "clever" stamped across his forehead, playing verbose power-pop with Nothing Painted Blue and rhyming five-syllable words-- but his songs, about things like office supplies and urban development, had a knack for unironically addressing The Way We Live Now. His solo career has seen him mellow on the clever and work doubly hard on the real, putting him in a league with sometimes-collaborators John Darnielle (Mountain Goats) and John Vanderslice: people trying very hard to write songs about the complex highs and lows of people's unglamorous everyday lives. "Bulk Removal Truck" is Bruno's biggest success at this yet. Over a fingerpicked acoustic guitar, he begins:
Peter Hughes was out of townwhen our lease expired.So I turned some temp work downand did what was requiredto get the house as well preparedfor walkthrough as I could.
What follows is really an emotional masterpiece of the everyday, the cleaning up of the things that actually comprise most of our lives: books, coats, Post-It notes, freezers in need of defrosting. It's a litany of waterlogged settees and security deposits gliding into a simple, unexpected metaphor: "This is how it ends-- friends are lost to lovers, and lovers lost to friends."
It's the sort of sentiment-- and song, and album-- best appreciated in certain wistful contexts: during the bad hours of a killer drive, for instance, when you've already listened to every disc in the car and anything with a kickdrum or a power chord would seem as obnoxious as having Andrew "Dice" Clay in the passenger seat. Hangovers; Sunday mornings; trying to get to sleep once the sun's already battering the blinds; listening after you've already got the whole thing memorized. It's spacious and low-key and great-sounding: most tracks work from subdued guitar, with double bass, cello, trumpet, or light percussion rounding out the minimal arrangements. A lot of songs go country-western; others take on the form of jazz standards and bossa nova pop. Breezy; friendly.
Also writerly: a collection of very short stories as much as anything else, with the instrumentation largely playing support for the texts. The exhausted-sounding "Tired of the West" is a winner both in music and in metaphor, the giving-up lament of the would-be pioneer who strikes out for a new life and eventually finds it as disappointing as the old one; the stately musette-and-piano title track makes exactly the self-deprecating apology one expects; the third-wheel story of "Dashboard Issues" has a tossed-off charm that deepens into something near-perfect. "Blue's the Only Color", on the other hand, is a trifling faux piano-bar number-- you can probably guess what comes after "blue's the only color of the rainbow"-- and the more swinging "Love's Got a Ghetto" doesn't exactly take that conceit anywhere valuable. The album's centerpiece, "Janet Shaw", is an ominously sprawling and only partly successful rummage through the keepsakes of a one-time starlet.
Hits and misses, then. What's amazing is how literature's working through its own crisis of confidence has put songwriters in such a position to take up its traditional role. It's not that pop music-- or indie rock, or what have you-- doesn't tell us anything about our lives, but there's something to the way guys like Bruno and Darnielle approach it that's difficult to get elsewhere: these are the people that can sort through the banality of the life that everyone complains about-- the cluttered bedrooms and beat-up cars and undramatic breakups-- and, when they get it right, locate what it is in there that makes it important to us. And as with most writerly records, this one only seems to be growing on me.
