Eef Barzelay has spent his career in a lonely spot. The Israeli-born singer-songwriter who records under the name Clem Snide has stumbled through all the trappings of alternative fame: a short-lived major-label deal, a tight-knit community of fans, a self-sustained schedule of crowd-sourced tours and new releases. But his timing has never quite worked. He was a buzz band before buzz bands existed, an early adopter who never cashed in. Put it this way—there are cult favorites and then there are the musicians who find themselves, two decades into their careers, performing at their fans’ family gatherings. “Thanks for coming? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say in this situation,” Barzelay said, guitar strapped around his neck, greeting attendees of Kim and Carla and Jim and Mary’s joint anniversary party in 2014.
This tragic, comic perseverance has long informed his music. When Clem Snide began in the mid ’90s, Barzelay’s work was lumped in with a wave of alt-country bands, mostly due to the distinctive sound of his voice: a hoarse, twangy grumble, pitched somewhere between Jeff Tweedy and Jeff Mangum. But from the beginning, Barzelay’s visions were more playful and absurd than his contemporaries’: “The Dairy Queen has melted/Having laid all her eggs,” went a typical opening couplet. As he soldiered on, his songwriting grew both more adventurous and more direct; as of late, he’s been offering to write specially commissioned biographical songs for his listeners. Our world is small and our time here is brief, he seems to say. Why not get to know each other?
He opens up a bit on Forever Just Beyond, the first Clem Snide album in five years. After seeing a video of the Avett Brothers covering one of his songs, Barzelay reached out to Scott Avett to collaborate on new material and, possibly, help revitalize his career. Together they crafted a comeback album that feels both charmingly at ease and refreshingly ambitious. Like kindred spirits bonding over a packed bowl, they immediately turn to the big questions. Within the first three songs, they discuss the supposed final words of film critic Roger Ebert (“It’s all an elaborate hoax”), the nature of humanity itself (“We are a wave endlessly breaking”), and at least one man’s definition of the word “God” (deep breath: “God is simply that which lies forever just beyond the limit/Of what we already seem to know”).
It’s heady stuff, and Avett is smart to pair Barzelay with the most natural, elegant production of his career. In the past, his best work has been artfully orchestrated (2001’s The Ghost of Fashion, 2005’s End of Love) or purposefully unadorned (2006’s solo album Bitter Honey). These songs split the difference with a healthy dose of reverb, layered acoustic guitar, campfire percussion, and background vocals that linger and dissipate like clouds of smoke. While the lyrics turn constantly toward the meaning of life and the inevitability of death, the music is content to simply float along, understated and picturesque. Or as Barzelay puts it in “Easy,” “We only see through keyholes/But maybe that’s all that our eyes can take.”
Around the announcement of the record, Barzelay, who turns 50 this year, made a confession: “That this record even exists, as far as I’m concerned, is a genuine miracle.” He described his forties as being full of both “deep despair and amazing opportunities,” and the record draws on both types of experience with the same sense of wonder. In “Easy,” he explores the meaningless of the term “selling out” in a world where the personal stakes for making art seem unbearably high. Even more intense is “The Ballad of Eef Barzelay,” a dreamlike narrative that cycles through suicidal thoughts, self-help, and a memory of cooking lamb kebab for his weed guy. It’s as personal as any song he’s written, but it’s also, amid the album’s grand theorizing of the universe, just as profound—a story of survival that Barzelay sounds grateful just to be here singing.
