Stephin Merritt may be indiedom's Oscar Wilde, but Nick Currie (aka Momus) has long been lobbying to become its Baudelaire. For a while, it seemed like the Scot might get the job: his bon mots are sufficiently toxic, his imagery runs to rococo decadence, and best of all, he walks the walk: Currie's biography is a steady succession of scandals. A quick recap would include his marriage to a 17-year-old Bangladeshi girl-- which had British tabloids occupied for a good part of 1994-- and a lost lawsuit over a song about Wendy Carlos. The financial fallout of the latter had Momus soliciting wealthy fans for old-fashioned patronage (he sold them "song portraits" at $1000 a pop) and generally upping productivity-- the fleurs of which we are picking to this day. Oskar Tennis Champion, his unlistenable new album, suggests the launch of a different fund drive: Pay Momus to Zip It.
Written and recorded in Japan (where Momus is fairly well established-- he wrote a hit called "I Am a Kitten" for pop star Kahimi Karie), the CD takes no inspiration from its surroundings, other than an unpleasant ambient intro titled "Spooky Kabuki", which finds Currie croaking "we are the pirates" over clicks, burbles and sine waves. The album's production adds a superfluous glitch layer to Momus's usual Casio sea shanties, and the results are somewhat reminiscent of Future Bible Heroes' "Eternal Youth", the vampires-and-aliens opus that arguably marks Stephin Merritt's lowest moment to date. But to compare the two would be to ascribe Oskar Tennis Champion a degree of coherence, and I'm not that generous.
Song after song, Currie's trademarked sick wit is nowhere to be found. "My Sperm Is Not Your Enemy" is a vintage Momus title, but it's hung on a predictable and humorless ditty; the same goes for "Beowulf (I Am Deformed)", and whatever hilarity could be gleaned from "Electrosexual Sawing Machine" comes from the posh way Momus pronounces "seks-you-al."
Hope is momentarily rekindled with the arrival of "The Last Communist", an energetic number with an actual melody, rather than a half-assed waltz or polka pastiche. Alas, the song is quickly exposed as a third-rate Auteurs ripoff, the kind Luke Haines probably writes in his uneasy absinthe sleep. The lyrics are an embarrassing laundry list of lame Russki clichés ("Drinking vodka through a straw/ Looking for the visions Lenin saw"), which is more than a disappointment from the guy who wrote "Trans-Siberian Express"-- a cruel, precise, and terrific poem that deserves a place in any number of modern literary anthologies.
That was old Momus, I guess, unencumbered by tabloid infamy and money concerns. The new Momus is the kind of guy who stoops to include a minute of silence as the 16th track on this disc and titles it "A Minute of Silence". If that's not enough, he follows it up with an instrumental reprise of the album's second track-- rendered in telephone ringtones! Oh, the fun!
Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit. The man's main fallacy, however, is that his laboriously cultivated image of a postmodern ponce is binding and irreversible. Behind the moniker of the Greek God of Ridicule, Nick Currie is an erudite man who consigned himself to powdered-wig naughtiness and endless intimations of buggery. This kind of stuff gets old-- even for the joker-- and there's nothing to kill a comedy routine like a whiff of noblesse oblige.
