Lou: Best we can figure. We interviewed his hippie neighbor, said he heard weird things coming from up here all night: chainsaws, shotguns, beartraps, piranhas, you name it. Hippie said he came up to see what was going on, and the guy yelled all kinds of crap at him. Never opened the door, though.
Lou: Stuff about some album being so "brilliantly bonkers" he couldn't take it anymore. Something about, "Is everyone in North Dakota as original as June Panic? No wonder you never hear about that place!" Then something about how June Panic was "so free of the shirt-tugging insecurity of hipster dinks."
Lou: The hippie neighbor asked him to turn the music down, and Mr... Bowens, he turns it up, exclaiming "yes!" after certain lyrics.
Lou: One of the Jesus lyrics was "the carpenter got married to a board." Uh, another was: "Time chooses you because you are the one plus one." The hippie heard lyrics about birth being an eviction, and about how learning to walk was really learning to walk alone. Through the door, Mr Bowens was exclaiming how "freshly crushing" these, uh, sentiments were.
Lou: Not on my watch, they didn't. More yammering: Bowens said Mr. Panic's voice could "dither from gorgeous to awkward in the same syllable," and asked him to "imagine a so-cute-it's-ugly, or so-ugly-it's-cute love-child of Jeff Buckley and Jad Fair." Then he said: "Imagine a male Belinda Carlisle, imagine Smurff Mangum, imagine Keebler Oberst."
Lou: Nothing's turned up yet, though the hippie recognized a bunch of references to a Bob Dylan, which we learned is an alias for one Robert Zimmerman out of Minnesota. Mr. Bowens said that Panic was "a spacier basement Dylan", that his band The Silver Sound had "synthesized Desire, Slow Train Coming, and the Lanois-produced latter-day albums." The arrangements on the country-rock songs, he said, "were as breezy and foreboding as the last two Bonnie 'Prince' Billy records." Lastly, the hippie had to endure a speech about how the song "Hung-Up" was "among the finest reconciling-a-dead-love chronicles ever, ever." Bowens wailed the chorus, "We tried and that is all we know: we tried/ We die and that is all we know: We die."
Gossett: This guy sounds like a fruit. How many more lives will this confounded rock music take before somebody props a law up against it?
Gossett: "Dear Cruel World: I have never beheld anything like this turbo-ambitious concept album about Jesus, sex, childbirth, and Megadeath. As intelligent as it is insane, this album easily trumps Panic's decent recent work, and buries his tinny racket dating back to the late 80s. Baby's Breadth is constantly interesting. 'Giving Up the Ghost' is the 'Meat Is Murder' of anti-circumcision anthems, beginning with the call 'Don't circumcise your baby!' and ranging through lines such as, 'These puritans in fear mutilate children and call it hygiene.' The song features choruses to be sung by both grown-ups and 'grown-downs' about 'medi-sin.' Panic's argument is that boys get clipped because adults are lonely and dead."
Lou: Fat chance that gibberish gets played on the radio between "Bump Your Horny Parts Up Against My Horny Parts" and "Have You Driven a Ford Lately", eh, boss?
Gossett: There's more: "On 'Honey Careen', Panic sings of meat that flowers and sucks rain. Truly he is from a place where bees flock and birds swarm. The album is divided into chapters, and Chapter Five, entitled 'The Wondering Womb or God's Hysterical Pregnancy' consists of a trilogy on par with any trio from Love's psychedelic-doom flagship Forever Changes. 'Sex Is for Children' kicks off with the line, 'Fuck for your beautiful children,' and gets bolder from there. 'Death Is Gonna Part You' is like an existential children's song from some lost, Kierkegaard-scripted episode of Sesame Street. 'Even when your love is true/ Death will part you,' Panic sings, trying to get this assertion to be viewed as comforting, while he hammers home a notion of self becoming something better later, 'a light.' The finale, 'If Enough of Us Die', argues that we could stand to lose a few of us dowdy planet-crowders. Get ready for lyrics that proclaim, 'It takes faith just to sleep/ That's for sure/ It's a monster,' and possibly my favorite closing line from an album since the end of Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: 'If enough of us die and the rest take to drinking/ You know we might find that the world is not so unkind/ Only restless." June Panic is the opposite of cool. This album is crafted as if he's the one who came up with Shakespeare's equation that sound plus fury eventually equals diddly. Baby's Breadth so deserves the wide audience it will probably never get. You already know these songs. The sun has already hit its half-life. Goodbye, you nation of gawkers. Return to sender, etc."
