Abraham Lincoln is said to have once simultaneously dodged controversy and lodged a complaint in a book review by writing, "For those of you who like this sort of thing, you'll find this the sort of thing that you like." The problem for the new head-scratch of an album by Stuart David's Looper is that it's not even of a "sort." In fact, it blends hints of so many genres and idioms that it becomes genreless and idiomless, leaving me only to proffer oxymorons like "white-noir" and "anglo-funk."
To further complicate critiquery, the album boasts a song called "Driving Myself Crazy" on which David sings, "I'm driving myself crazy," over and over and then some more. Then he sings, "I go on and on and on and on and I won't shut up," over and over and then some more. So the next line is, "I'm trying not to listen but it just won't stop." Now that's like handing a reviewer a brass bedpost with 'Bludgeon Me' stenciled on it. Yet the damn song, for all its daring you to desist it, pulses around one of the album's better keyboard lines.
Looper's first single introduced folks to the notion that something could be stank up in Belle and Sebastian. As the group cloyingly became more a collective than Captain Murdoch's Tuneful Melancholy Express, the spoken word-y Stuart David went and decided, like Whitney Houston, never to walk in anyone's shadow, bailing altogether from the wan clan. Subsequent releases under the Looper name perpetuated a toybox ethic of so-so sounds, drum machines, and stories. The Snare roams far enough from that turf to seem like a sly bait-and-switch on par with the killer-less Halloween III: Season of the Witch, leading the listener to wonder why David didn't released it under some other pseudonym (perhaps Peacock Johnson, the character from David's novel with whom this disc is vaguely concerned). It'd have made The Snare the most odd such outing since Stephen Tunney squeezed an excellent rock adaptation out of his mockalyptic novel Flan, employing his Shimmy-Disc stage name Dogbowl.
Easy to dismiss, smirk at, or even hate on the fist listen, nine out of The Snare's ten tracks are grind-and-pause, semi-sultry pairings of exotic keyboard settings and mid-tech beats that exploit their refrains and come weirdly close to the patterns of 'risqué' after-dinner radio pop circa 1999-present. So, let's see, how do I put this... the, er, beats, they, uh, well, never, never change or build or fade within a song, and since they share the same constituent elements and the same calculated mood, the songs fail to differentiate themselves until the nth listen, by which time the shifting vibra-tones, trumpets, saxes and flutes (particularly those of the dratmospheric "Lover's Leap") will have had plenty of time to slap you around their seedy motel's parlor. Cellos, violins and the occasional stand-up bass creep through the proceedings, as if not wanting to be spotted.
All the songs are... sung, which is a departure for Looper/David/Johnson, but the singing is personafied, a knowing, untrustable whisper that suggests lonerdom even when chronicling all manner of intimacy. The clichés draw hordes of flies here and there, and the blokey humorlessness nearly provokes laughter. The album's constipated Curtis Mayfieldisms and Isaac Hayes tinctures, combined with the cover's cold suggestion of a ratty, slickish corner hustler, can drive the listener to reckon Peacock Johnson a daft Shaft, or Rudy Ray Less. Which is still a cut above my initial response (embarrassment for David).
Track ten, though, provides a gloriously more interesting text. Suddenly, we're out of Mick the Rat's borough and among the hetero-fops and waterheads of Tweeville, only Mick's stringy ass is following us, bringing his inhumanity with him like a pox. I can't help but construe this ditty's spry arrangement as a comment on B&S;, mixing David's oldie "Century of Elvis" with the featherweight bits of The Boy With the Arab Strap. The sweetly sung lyrics (intentionally) hilariously mix weaker B&S; sentiments: "Such a funny old feeling, such a beautiful day/ Come on, get up off the ground." Except, see, someone's really on the ground: "Come on, you're getting blood all over the place." Things get worse in ways I shouldn't recount on this family-oriented website, but here's a peek at the chorus, after a "don't look so frightened, dear" a "take your hands away from your face," a "don't get excited," a "this isn't serious," and a "don't try and run": "We're only fucking around/ We're both just fucking around."
Ultimately more misanthropic and befitting of Todd Solondz in its 4\xBD minutes than the entire Storytelling LP, "Fucking Around" first teases the wit and indirectness out of B&S;'s seduction-as-a-lark canon, then moves on to showcase the disturbing dichotomy of tenderness and violence that complex-ifies David Lynch's manifestly unsafe territory. The Snare's droll, wanna-be gumshoe darkness ("She's a Knife," "This Evil Love") ends up strangely redeemed by absolute depravity masquerading as bubble-gum. By not being able to gush over or pan Stuart David, I feel like I'm letting a small-time crook get away, possibly to commit more ambitious crimes. And in the end, David acknowledges, and then escapes, his own career's trappings. But now he's the sole practitioner of what, horror-pop?
