It's got plenty of competition, but the most perceptively funny song Jonathan Richman of the last 10 years or so might be a gem called "My Affected Accent." Basically, it's Richman looking back at himself in high school, four decades on, and fessing to how insufferably pretentious he was. "I used big words, I talked through my hat," he sings. "I said 'the aforementioned' when I should have said 'that.'" He marvels that he wasn't bullied more than he was.
It's quite likely that another good-humored Boston songwriter, Ben Potrykus of the punky indie-pop quartet Bent Shapes, will look back at his youth and share Richman's regrets. Potrykus writes in the language of the educated elite, and uses words that would make him unbearable to converse with in real life, like "matriculate," "stultified," and "conscripted." But if nothing else, he's in on the joke, and on the band's sharp sophomore album Wolves of Want, his verbosity becomes a kind of running punchline. On "USA vs POR" he tries his grad-student vocabulary on a girl at the bar during a World Cup match, and it doesn't get him anywhere. He even ends the album with an apology of sorts for being so long-winded, which is itself really long-winded: "There's no neutral narrative / Or, at least, that's what I've been parroting / in so many words (mostly intransitive verbs)." This is a guy who clearly gives a fuck about Oxford commas.
It's a clever songwriting gambit, casting himself as an unlikable blowhard, and Potrykus gets away with it in part because Bent Shapes' music is so inherently likable. Crisply, unobtrusively produced by Titus Andronicus's Elio DeLuca, Wolves' revved-up tunes crackle with ringing guitars and sugar-rush choruses that are as succinct as Potrykus's prose is overblown. As on the band's debut, Feels Weird, there are times when the band's youthful, excitable energy flirts with emo, but they always pull back before crossing that line. They're too self-aware to cut loose like that—or, as Potrykus puts it on the Los Campesinos!-peppy "86'd in ’03," "self-aware, but not too cool to care."
And as part of his insecure-cool-kid act, Potrykus makes a lot of references to his record collection. "86'd" ends with him getting high and shouting along to Nirvana's "I Hate Myself and I Wanna Die." The title of the anti-social media screed "What We Do Is Public" plays on the Germs' "What We Do Is Secret," while the song opens with a callback to the Beatles ("I've just seen a face / I can't forget the date and place") and closes with one to Pink Floyd ("All in all / You're just another pic on my wall.") A tangle of C86 guitars, "Samantha West" bows out with a nod to Outkast: "I'm sorry, Mrs. West / but I am for real."
Wolves is Bent Shapes' first album for Slumberland, and like many of the label's newer signees —Joanna Gruesome, The Mantles, Young Guv, among them—the band is versed in the label's past but never overly beholden to it. For Potrykus there's a kind of security in this tuneful, wound-up pop. Its cheerfulness gives him cover not only to poke fun at himself, at his music scene, and the world in general, but also to voice his very real struggles with anxiety. On the closer "Intransitive Verbs," he dials back his smart-assery long enough for a few blunt verses about his demons. "I've been working so long to prove myself wrong when I said puberty would be my midlife crisis," he sings. He's a skilled enough songwriter that he could probably pull off an entire sobering album about this stuff. Instead he made a really fun, self-effacing one.
