Arne Van Petegem, the Belgian who records under the name Styrofoam, is known for wrapping an indie sensibility with not-so-indie filigree: clicks, bloops, beeps, and other traces of android flatulence. It's a tough job, and Ben Gibbard can't fill all the orders. Van Petegem mostly sticks to this plan in A Thousand Words, but he's no longer going it alone. After five self-produced albums, he has decided to hire Wax Ltd., the production duo brave enough to accommodate both Jessica Simpson and Eels. This time around, he has also invited an especially colorful list of guests: the Jimmy Eat World guy, an alt-country guy, someone from the Submarines, and a collaborator from a band named Blondfire. Our office likely received its copy several weeks after Alternative Press did.
Van Petegem talks a good game. "I wanted to make an up-tempo pop album with big choruses to sing along to. I figured I'd made enough sulky mid-tempo music for the rest of my life." The curious feat of this album is that it manages to achieve a version of the former that could only be appreciated by fans of the latter. In short, zippy anthems for angsty man-children. Far too many of these songs seemed pointed at girlfriends who have already made, or are a breath away from making, the healthiest choice: leaving Styrofoam's wussy narrator in the lurch. In a duet with Erica Driscoll, she's told to wait up: she's wrong. In "Thirty to One" the female addressee is told, on second thought, not to wait up for him. She, too, is wrong. Blake Hazard is told she acts fatalistically, which we can safely assume is wrong. This is how the Belgians treat their guests?
The truth is, you know this man, having heard him in the background of Ashton Kutcher movies and in the food courts of local malls. He couches his overtures in the lingo of self-help. Not even computerized percussion can relieve his post-breakup pain. He is the mall-core antihero, eternal romantic victim, and Arne Van Petegem channels him so thoroughly that otherwise rational adults will feel themselves aging in reverse, à la Benjamin Button, only to stop at the whiny nadir of adolescence: circa eighth grade. This is likely what crossed the diseased minds in that last M. Night Shyamalan movie. In the real world, luckily, suicidal ideation can be avoided simply by avoiding this record.
