Tim Kinsella tries hard. Really hard. There is no way that music as intensely spastic as his could be anything less than totally honest. As the leader of Cap'n Jazz, Owls, Joan of Arc, Friend/Enemy, and now Make Believe, Kinsella has made a whole landfill's worth of extremely unique music that has passion on its side but little else.
Make Believe is basically Joan of Arc, the rock-ish version. It's still disjointed, pretentious, and frequently unlistenable, but it now at least coheres occasionally into something you can latch onto and get inside of, usually just before sliding right back apart into a primordial mess. The music basically works on a principal wherein any knotty guitar riff, killer bass line, or cogent drum part must dissolve into grating chaos before it becomes too meaningful or, God forbid, straightforward. Opener "Amscaredica (the Beautiful)" sticks mostly to a nicely tweaked, limping groove taken from the mid-1970s King Crimson handbook, but the bits where it leaves that groove sound absolutely lost. Guitarist Sam Zurick does intriguing things with knotty rhythms, and the songs are at their best when he's in the driver's seat, picking through his little tone clusters. Otherwise, the album is like walking through a Guitar Center, with two dozen amateurs hammering away on various instruments independently.
Kinsella is Kinsella, through and through-- what else would you expect him to be? The chorus of "Say What You Mean" is transcribed in the lyric booklet as "How-eee-yah-oo-oowow--oo/ Hay-ee--ee--ay," which doesn't quite capture the ragged psychosis conveyed in his unhinged delivery. The lyrics involving actual words are scarcely more scrutable, though intriguing imagery does occasionally pop up out of the gobbledegook, like the suddenly lucid line "she crossed her legs and made a show of dangling her shoe from her toe" in "Fumio Nambata Had a Farm Ee-I-Ee-I-O". On "One Zero", he's "making the bed with you in it," while on "Small Apartment Party Epiphany", someone's "taught the cat to moonwalk, and now he's becoming a real showoff."
Do I really need to spell out that anyone who never liked Kinsella in the first place shouldn't bother with this? As relatively direct as it is, Shock of Being is still hideously overwrought. On the other hand, Kinsella's past fans aren't going to be stepping off the wagon here, either, so the album doesn't really advance the plot on either front. Rather, it's just another bizarre curio from a guy who, as much as I'd like to root for him, can't seem to make a record I want to listen to more than once.
