Jade Tree's press release hypes Control as a concept album about the dissolution of a "hyper-modern marriage," but Pedro the Lion's David Bazan has a difficult time sticking to the subject on this, his third full-length. Aside from a few cynical words for pre-nups in opener "Options" and not one, but three meditations on extramarital sex (thanks for sharing, Dave), the album is padded with typical Pedro ruminations on the pitfalls of vanity and technology.
Unlike our esteemed colleague DiCrescenzo, I enjoyed Winners Never Quit, with its thoughtful and highly personal themes of loss, regret, and competition. But where that album moved with confidence and conviction of purpose, Control wallows in an amoral netherworld of overamped midtempo ballads and incomplete thoughts.
Control's lack of focus is best exemplified by "Indian Summer," a synthy rocker peppered with rhyming non-sequiturs such as, "The experts say you ought to start them young/ That way they'll naturally love the taste of corporate cum." A sluggish, vocoder-treated new recording of "April 6, 2039" (now titled "Progress") does little but detract from the spacey, drum-machine propelled futurism of the original. With its refrain of "your father drank a little, you're on liver number two," Bazan's cautionary words of children spoiled by technology and their parents' emotional detachment should be Control's moral centerpiece, yet the lackluster reading here barely registers.
Instead, Bazan obsesses on the seedy details of his protagonists' motel-room infidelities. "The mattress creaks beneath the symphony of misery and cum," Bazan sings on the aggressive, voyeuristic "Second Best." "Still we lie jerking back and forth, and blurring into one." But Control is never more misguided than on the silly, Metaphor 101 observations of "Rapture," which cheaply likens the moment of orgasm to divine revelation and even slows the pace of the song down, post-coitally, before pepping back up again.
Musically, Control breaks little new ground for Pedro the Lion, though Bazan's drumming has improved greatly since Winners Never Quit, best showcased in the loping rhythms and artfully executed fills of "Magazine." Unfortunately, Bazan goes on to illustrate why you should never let a drummer mix his own record on the next cut, "Rehearsal," with some of the hammiest fills since Wayne's World's Garth drummed for U2 and a headache-inducing barrage of overdriven cymbals. Somebody send Bazan a copy of The Soft Bulletin, pronto!
Not that Control doesn't have its moments: "Penetration," co-written with Seldom's Casey Foubert, is a reasonably cathartic requiem for a dotcom layoff, with chiming, Edge-like guitars and a brash, anthemic chorus. Lines like, "We're so sorry, sir, but you did not quite make the cut this time," will ring sympathetically with anyone who's ever been passed over as casually as a grade-school snot picking teams for dodgeball. "Priests and Paramedics," rising majestically from the overkill of "Second Best," is elevated by a lovely, Thom Yorke-ish melody custom made for Bazan's stoned tenor. It's not hard to imagine its tired protagonist stepping out of Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead and onto the murder scene of Winners's "Never Leave a Job Half Done." The song's evocative imagery and fetching arrangement deserve a better concept album than the jumbled pastiche of Control.
Even Bazan's occasionally astute observations are offset by such poetry-contest entries as, "It will never rain again/ It should do wonders for the GNP," and, "How does that work for you in your quest to be above reproach?" Or the half-baked philosophy of the dead-on-arrival album closer, "Rejoice": "Wouldn't it be so wonderful if everything were meaningless?" Oh, honestly, Dave.
It would be easy to dismiss Control as a pompous, self-important failure were Bazan a vain and sanctimonious artist. But he's not-- he seems like a soft-spoken, thoughtful, nice-enough guy just like you and me. And while he may never make his own OK Computer or Soft Bulletin or whatever he set out to make with Control, I won't dock him points for trying.
