Dan Treacy and the Television Personalities have a big legacy-- a spot on the CV as godfathers of do-it-yourself pop, and a terrific 1980s back catalog of witty, eccentric new-wave and indie. Listening to Treacy's signature puppy/schoolboy voice-- the most vulnerable voice in the world-- and clocking the humor and whimsy scattered across those records, you'd hardly expect the guy to turn out a rock-star casualty; he's a twee-pop touchstone, not a sweaty romantic. But drug problems (and mental ones) don't much care for those distinctions. By the 90s, Treacy was missing and presumed dead; when he turned up this decade, it was while doing time on an English prison boat. When he was released, and told his friends he'd been writing songs all along, a lot of machinery sprang into motion to make this album possible-- from fans raising cash for studio time to the Brit rock label Domino signing the Television Personalities to its roster. Their press release calls the band "the original Babyshambles," but this particular wreck is a lot more human than stylish.
The first track we heard from this turned out to be perfect. The re-recorded version on the album is titled "I Hope You're Happy Now", and it's exactly the kind of song Treacy's always shined on-- languid, unassuming, unguarded, shambling-along guitar-pop, recorded in the kind of warm, naturalistic way not much heard these days. It was also perfectly placed in the Treacy story: The original title was "I Hope He's Everything You Wanted Me to Be", and the sense of fatigue, resignation, and disappointment in his vocals was awfully easy to connect with. Everyone must have been hoping that prison time had netted a whole record's worth of songs like this-- well-crafted, forlorn, and with a whole lot of very serious things to say, an unpremeditated "real deal" collection of intensely human stuff. A whole lot of people write a whole lot of earnest songs on guitars; sometimes it's nice to hear some that feel like one of them is genuinely struggling to express something honest.
But not quite. My Dark Places doesn't just uncover shadowy corners in its subject matter-- it's also musically unkempt, stumbling along and veering off in directions most bands wouldn't even be comfortable using as B-sides or jokes. "All the Young Children on Crack" consists mostly of a spare drumbeat repeating while Treacy sings the title-- interwoven with some fumbling handclaps and acoustic guitar wanders. "Ex-Girlfriend Club" is actively creepy, with Treacy speaking as the club's tour guide ("Help yourself to the salad bar") before singing bits of "Uptown Top Ranking", running in an odd sampled break, and talking about Puff Daddy over shapeless piano lines. Some tracks seem improvised, thrown-together, Treacy half-singing off a lyric sheet as the instruments around him try to find something interesting to do. Fans-only references abound: paisley shirts and miniskirts, "paradise is for the blessed," etc. Even the best songs aren't prime-time performances-- they're shambling in a worrying way, as if they only just barely managed to get themselves recorded at all.
When the songs are good, though, that quality is what provides a lot of the charm-- which has often been the way with this band. And a lot of these tracks turn out to be incredible. "She Can Stop Traffic" captures lots of things: the raw romantic enthusiasm of this act; the boyish, starry-eyed quality that comes out when the band "rocks"; and the wit and the pain both, which Treacy combines over the ending fade. ("She can stop traffic," he sings, "and she's mine. Or she was.") On tracks like "Dream the Sweetest Dreams", it's just the sound of the act that makes this so great-- these recordings aren't "lo-fi," but they're unadorned, in-the-room, full of a wide-open warmth, a slack human quality, and voices that leave them feeling spectacularly intimate. Considering that you get the same feeling from the lyrics, it's easy to see how the band's fans will be taken with this even in the moments where it's close to being a musical disaster: You forgive those things the way you might with your best friend's band. And as you listen more, a lot more of the record reveals itself as not so disastrous at all. This is a strange kind of "difficult" pop, where songs that first seem hard to listen to gradually take shape and acquire potent emotional effects.
On a few of these songs-- where Treacy plays his songs on piano, maybe accompanying his voice with a melodica-- that's exactly what's on offer: Whatever the quality of the music and the performance, there's an incredible amount of emotion that winds up coming through. (See "There's No Beautiful Way to Say Goodbye".) And whether Treacy's music is working or not, the one thing he always has working for him is the uniqueness of his approach; now more than ever, this sounds like pretty much nothing else, and in a way that's entirely unpremeditated. The most vulnerable voice in the world makes for the most vulnerable album in the world, and it's largely a train wreck-- but there are very good reasons to hope that Treacy stays well and keeps at it.
