True, Clem Snide's music shares similar funhouse-mirrored folk/bizarro-country concepts with the likes of veterans Lambchop and Palace. Unlike the great Lambchop, however, Clem Snide's contribution to the Snore-core movement features little but silly, oblique wordplay with music as mere afterthought: lethargic bass lines, barely-strummed C, G and F chords, maybe some morbid violin accompaniment. In the end, you're left with a boring, vague abstraction of country music. I'm not saying these guys have to necessarily choose between complete sincerity and over-the-top Ray Stevens parody. But can't we be entertained without forcing ourselves to accept these overbearing attempts at being "different?"
Yesiree, NYC's Clem Snide seems targeted for Next Different Thing greatness. They've also been ludicrously compared to both Hank Williams and Jonathan Richman. Your Favorite Music has even been likened to the Velvet Underground's eponymous 1969 album. Insane! And sorry, but dopey, meandering songs like "The Dairy Queen," featuring mundane slices of small-town teen life, can't even compare to the best of Don Williams, much less the worst of Hank. As for the Richman comparisons? Listen to Jonathan Goes Country, then see if you can keep a straight face while discussing Clem Snide's inherent genius.
It seems Clem Snide have squeezed themselves into the perfect hip micro-genre. Uh, let's say... lo-fi post-irony country vaudeville. Much like the empty conceptualist/visual ironist Damien Hirst, the band thrives simply on their acquired Next Different Thing status. The lead singer even has a "different" name: Eef. And enduring his grating faux-country nasal drone, coupled with the band's constant struggle to merely change chords, is like being subjected to the never-ending slow drip of a leaky faucet.
Lyrics like "Tonight we're gonna party like its 1989," and "How's that Deep Purple record I hummed in your ear/ Like a fight song whispered through a pillow," beg for laugh tracks. Worse yet, Eef sings all this nonsense with utmost deadpan detachment and exaggerated apathy; which, in the indie community, is often confused with charm. Funny thing about Eef, though: he's misanthropic and cynical as hell, albeit in his own insidiously subtle, "aw, shucks" sort of way. Take the sarcastic "African Friend," for instance. The singer intimates that his girlfriend is insecure with her pigmentally-challenged self. She becomes interested in a more "exotic" person of color. Be yourself, says the threatened boyfriend, and come back to the sensitive everyday white dude: "Come lay on the couch with me/ We don't have to work on our tans." I ask you, America, is this funny?
"I Love the Unknown" pokes fun at a drifter type whose excuse for eluding responsibility and relationships is found in the song's title. The title track is, for lack of a more obnoxious critical categorization, repetitive irony-drenched neo-folk trip-hop. Here, Eef, ever the elitist gonzo philosopher, derides a female whose tenuous hold on individuality is wrapped up in listening to sad, obscure music: "Your favorite music/ Well, it just makes you sad/ But you like it/ 'Cause you feel special that way.../ I can't teach you to learn to love yourself." Ahh.
The lyrics, at best, seem coughed up in a random stream-of-semi-consciousness: "roads paved with liver and onions"; "your heart's a muscle, that's all"; "jumping jacks could ease your mind"; "you smell like bread"; "cutting my teeth on her shoulders." And once you've made it as far as their seemingly faithful cover of Richie Valens' "Donna," the album's relentless tongue-in-cheekiness has warped your judgment: should I be enjoying this as a serious cover? And if I like it, will I be secretly mocked by the band?
Your Favorite Music is nothing more than a bad joke; one your favorite neighborhood hipsters pretend to get, for fear of being ostracized by whatever indie-centric social milieu their lives depend on. If you're an outcast like me, you don't mind admitting these songs aren't even as childishly amusing as your roommate's new architecturally-unsound haircut. You really wonder, then, how a band this dreadful can be deemed to possess such genius, and gain such a following. Then again, consider how we ended up with Jim "Ernest" Varney as our president. The Age of Idiocy is upon us, folks. We've got 'ol figurehead Dubya, his band of faux-Christian lunatics, and pseudo-musicians like Clem Snide all on the same path to world domination, fooling the easily-duped masses every step of the way. Big time.
