After six albums, a couple of EPs, a major-label misadventure, a fleeting moment in the primetime spotlight, and a fresh start with a new indie imprint, one hopes Eef Barzelay would take his own go-for-broke advice: "If you're gonna lose then/ Might as well lose big then," he sings on the title track to his new album, Lose Big. Unfortunately he's chosen instead to take his cues from the record's Eeyore-esque opening number, "Could Be Worse": "Please forgive me if I leave you feeling uninspired," Barzelay wearily mewls, "my only pleasure is to make that bubble burst." Knowing the Clem Snide leader's fondness for super-sized irony, he might just be tweaking fans' expectations, or playing up critics' claims about his purportedly pro-forma folk-rock. Sadly, that withering couplet could serve as an honest-to-goodness apology for what Lose Big has to offer.
Even at his most esoteric and flippant-- for example, writing from the point of view of a hip-hop video dancer with aspirations for medical school, or talking about love in terms of sweatsuits and ankle sprains-- there's an earnestness in how Barzelay catalogues idiosyncratic details. On Lose Big, Barzelay eschews such scenic routes for a more straightforward tact, and it does him no favors. Cutting to the quick makes Barzelay's sentiments sound disingenuous and crass, especially on "The Girls Don't Care", where he offers lovelorn hipsters some words of wisdom regarding the fairer sex-- "Don't listen to Frank Zappa/ Play Coltrane, Faust, or Can...the girls just want a sweet melody." The song tries to let itself in on the joke by closing with a half-ass rave-up, the sort of self-indulgent move the ladies purportedly don't fall for. It's a fitting trick ending for a track that's not half as clever as it wants to be.
Less showy songs fall prey to the same missteps. The heavy-handed condemnations of "How Dare They" are leaden enough without Barzelay adding obnoxious nudging distortion to the track's graceless stomp. "Apocalyptic Friend" aims for grandiose poesy about the end of the world, going so far as to nick My Morning Jacket's vocal reverb to lend his words an ominous effect, but falls well short of its mark. Even the relatively enjoyable "Numerology"-- the whimsical tale of a con man winnowing his way into the life of another mark-- beats itself into the ground to make sure there's no misunderstanding about the song's intentions. Would that some of this hyper-emphasis had found its way into "Take Me", a story about a young would-be runaway filled with evocative fragments ("fill my lungs fast and let them fly my kite") in desperate need of a more substantial foundation.
It's only with the title track, nestled deep in the album's second half, that the record finds its bearings. Barzelay pulls no punches in "Lose Big", sketching out the travails of a musician caught between his marriage and his love of music. At the song's start, he's all but ready to give up on the dream for the 9-to-5 lifestyle. By the song's end, he's hobnobbing with drunk girls and traveling to Europe. When Barzelay returns to the song's beginning-- "If you're gonna lose then/ Might as well lose big then"-- it becomes clear what the narrator was truly risking. It's a powerful and beautiful song, and it's followed by two equally effective tracks-- "True Freedom", concerning a bittersweet modern-day Romeo and Juliet, and "Song For Batya", a gorgeous and fragile elegy-- both notable for their lyrical acuity and musical restraint (two hallmarks of Barzelay's superior solo debut, Bitter Honey). The album ends with two previously released songs-- "No Me", from Barzelay's soundtrack for the 2007 indie film Rocket Science, and a faithful rerecording of Clem Snide's "I Love the Unknown" from the group's only major-label album, Your Favorite Music-- but "Batya", with its wistful refrain of "death is just the moment/ When the dying ends," is the record's true finale, and it's a fine note to finish on. It's just a shame that much of the rest of Lose Big rings off-key.
