One might think that Tim Kinsella, the outspoken shit-magnet/revered frontman of Joan of Arc, Make Believe, Owls, Cap'n Jazz, Friend/Enemy, etc., might have something to say about the current national and global political landscape. And so he does: In recent interviews, Kinsella's commentary on the state of things has ranged from understated irony ("I'm still a 'feminist'") to pointed anti-Bush administration railing ("I'll line up wherever I can against their fundamentalist doomsday plan"). The title of Joan of Arc's latest concept review waiting to happen, Joan of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain..., suggests that Kinsella might finally be prepared to hang up his dubious title of dadaist indie lightning rod to make an album statement of some political import. Let's find out:
"If D.C.'s streets make a neat pentagram and every dollar bill brags God's behind our plan/ Who am I to have any idea who I am?"
Ouch. Yes, Tim Kinsella just turned a potential indictment of Bush's "crusade" into a personal statement of his existential crisis. The rest of the album follows suit-- hints of Kinsella's criticism of the reigning machine are buried within awkward stabs at soul-searching and meandering character studies. In fact, Dick Cheney is invoked only once, on "The Title Track of This Album", when members of the band blankly repeat the phrase, "Joan of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain," over electronic noise from a drill. That's some biting commentary, all right.
I'm all for confrontational absurdism as a means of personal exploration in experimental rock-- Xiu Xiu has been doing it successfully since Brent DiCrescenzo got his last piece of Kinsella brother flame mail. But there's a thin line between expressing unspecific political frustration (I believe it was Nic Offer who ordered the president to, er, fellate him) and embracing empty nihilism to avoid the task of forming a valid personal ideology. The group's blindly cynical mud-flinging is best represented on "80s Dance Parties Most of All", where Kinsella, smart-ass to the core, argues (with tongue in cheek) that Internet porn, grammar, 24-hour days, Friendster, and global warming are all "conspiracies." Like the historical figures in the album's title, these things are listed arbitrarily, leading to an unavoidable question: What's the point?
Therein lies the fundamental flaw of the album: There isn't much of a point, and in view of our current political climate, Dick Cheney isn't a name to be dropped frivolously. Likewise, irony for irony's sake doesn't carry the same hipster-courting, smirk-inducing weight it might have back in the halcyon days of the late 90s, when an Al Gore concept album full of lyrics like, "There's politics to dressing warm/ And it has a subtext of muscle," and my personal favorite, "I've only one question left unanswered by both Sid Viscious [sic] and my mother-me-who?" could have been conceptually hilarious, if not exactly insightful.
In 2004, however, the baseless pessimism that pervades most of these songs comes across as lazy and irritating. "Apocalypse Politics" is particularly telling; the line, "With the earth agreed a circle/ Any and all points can each be the center simultaneously," is essentially a variation on the elliptical Zen premise of Modest Mouse's "3rd Planet". The crucial difference is that in Isaac Brock's version, the universe's profound circularity is humbling, reminding us that eventually all things will "end up where [they] were." Kinsella, on the other hand, crudely concludes that the "world continues ending in its infinite variable speeds." Kinsella's manic rhetoric has often been a divisive feature of Joan of Arc's output, but here the superficiality of his simple end-of-the-world theatrics is transparent.
The album's saving grace is the surrounding music, which almost, but not quite, makes up for Kinsella's constant barrage of tiresome non-sequiturs. Most songs exhibit a further expansion of the band's subdued post-rock inclinations explored on 2003's So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness, replacing the often formless compositions of their earlier work with relatively structured acoustic experimentation. "Queasy Lynn" finds its foundation in thundering carnival atmospherics, "Onomatopoeic Animal Faces" is a spare piano dirge, and the aforementioned "Dance Parties", with its muted cowbell-driven beat, quickly works into a dynamic, perpetual acid-folk groove.
Fragments of spastic acoustic instrumentation, such as the discordant piano figures in "Questioning Benjamin Franklin's Ghost", follow their own loose internal logic, and even abstract electronic experiments like "Deep Rush" demonstrate welcome restraint and concrete structure, further distancing the band from the shapeless music of The Gap and Live in Chicago, 1999. The band's overall sound has arguably never been more cohesive, thanks in part to Tortoise producer John McEntire's mixing efforts, and their development as a collective is promising.
Still, the music, though admittedly provocative, almost always plays the role of sonic backdrop to Kinsella's ridiculous tangential meditations, which ultimately sink the album. The despicable legacy of Dick Cheney & Co. deserves more consideration than a passing "go fuck yourself" in the form of a meaningless title reference and unflattering album cover portrait, and that seems to be all Kinsella has to offer.
