Readers who would demand that a review of, say, a forty-seven minute CD by Joan of Arc regard the work as an isolated thing-in-itself: please don't beat me up in the parking lot behind the Pitchfork Mobile HQ (by the way, our boombox-shaped Aerostar will be rocking Danzaville, Montana this week, and the first fifteen people to sign up for a Pitchfork Citibank Mastercard will win coupons for pepperoni condoms from Doug's Planned Parenthood Pizza Hospice). You see, I swore I would write a decontextualized, non-self-reflective review of this mother. But three of the four Joan of Arc releases covered by Pitchfork received ratings ranging from 1.9 to 2.2 by the site's vaunted saint Brent DiCrescenzo, whose name is hurled at me in countless hateful emails, evoking Sam Kinison's old routine about the hypothetical tortured sibling of Christ who had to bear mother Mary yelling, "Why can't you be more perfect like your brother Jesus?"
God rest his soul and arrange for seraphim to pet him with Fig Newtons, but I think the DiCrescenzo-ian resentment of the DuChamp-ian and DeBord-ian Tim Kinsella was only half-right (hence my doubling of his approximation of their worth). He accurately diagnosed Joan of Arc as a hip accouterment, a name on a poster to be hung above the porcelain piss-portals of a zillion clubgoers' sublets. But his dismissals too aggressively charge that the band is pretentious. This word gets thrown at anyone who mentions a theorist or poet or painter or Frenchman, but the word connotes pretending, and many of the people who cite theorists, poets, painters and Frenchmen aren't pretending; they're very much knowledgeable, and often passionate, about the "names" they're "dropping." Kinsella has been doing his fragile art-pud thing too long to still be considered a dilettante, though I admit that the line between ornate absurdist and fashion victim can be hard to trace. Typos in the lyric booklet further disservice his smarty-pants image.
Alas: This stupidly titled album is not good enough to escape the vestigial diss, resulting in the lowest rating of my first full year of taking my CD opinions too seriously (as for the 6.1 that I regrettably gave Looper's The Snare, I was young, I needed the money, and a 24-hour clinic was conveniently across the street-- even this Joan of Arc disc is better). My mammy raised a polite pushover, and I have been fortunate to have not had to review much crap, but this album accomplishes too little with its talent pool, forcing me to spank-rate it, perhaps fallaciously, based on its potential.
Tim Kinsella's last two helpings of frantic-to-lackadaisical gazebo-core, under the auspices of Owls and Friend/Enemy (color-coded on the CD spine to read "Free in My End," one burl in a string of Kinsella's dodgy homoerotic/anal come-ons/blow-offs), were strong enough to recruit me as a Kinsella Apologist. I took up for the weasel, against a churning sea of discontent. But this album, and brother Mike Kinsella's recent ill-sung bucket of merely passable dirge-pop (Owen's No Good for No One Now) have persuaded me to lobby for the other side. Whereas Victor Villareal's guitar work in Owls brought the instrument the closest it's ever come to replicating water, Kinsella's plink-and-strum here is way mathier, despite how majestically the salamandrine, rapid finger-yoga sections of "Olivia List" impress.
So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness is Owls on downers, or a Friend/Enemy that checked itself into an asylum. At some point, I stopped listening to it and began tolerating it. As gifted/studied as these musicians are, their contrapuntal arrangements and fidgety time signatures become, gasp, predictable. The steel drum on "Madelleine Laughing", is as adventurous as some of Friend/Enemy's (Need New Body-sponsored) scattershot pioneering, but the song is limp. The rest of the percussion is minimal and stilted, supporting the other players' experimental girth like canary legs beneath an elephant. When the band jazzes things up with the complex disco and muted coronet of "The Infinite Blessed Yes", they just sound like a homeless Steely Dan. Joan of Arc has abandoned the pastiche ethic of past albums to create compositions that flirt with being... songs. But that doesn't mean they go anywhere. While there has always been something inessential about Joan of Arc, this thing just languishes, ignoring the indie rock expectancy for gratifying blasts/spectacle like a cow chewing cud in a race against a combine.
Many Joan of Arc songs' dark undertones suggest the ominousness of the everyday, that something about normalcy is askew, but this approach gets cloying. Which is why the strangely optimistic-sounding tracks stand out like styrofoam anchors. The aforementioned "Olivia List", the sprightly "Mean to March", and "Mr. Participation Billy" are the album's most interesting numbers, the latter a near-homage to Tom Waits' Coney Island carnage-barking, a catalog of urban violence replete with tragicomic falsettos straight outta Frank's Wild Years.
Kinsella's previous two projects were aided by his best lyrics yet. These aren't so gripping, though he has ventured from his old Joan of Arc tack of Gertrude Stein-meets-(forgive this potentially offensive term for mangled Japanese commercial speech)-Engrish. These "natural" lyrics, though, suck: stream-of-consciousness, and premeditated, adlibbing, what-I-did-today spiels don't benefit from Kinsella's not screaming; the man has a guttural shriek as divine as Isaac Brock's, but you ain't getting it on this mumbly platter. Instead you encounter a speakeasy flat-croon, similar to how Will Oldham's been whispery of late, denying us his warbles and yelps. The "poetry" spoken at the end of the album is some of the wimpiest, wimpiest, wimpiest, unstomachably windy, emo-phillips, carbon-dated gossip-nostril, tantrum-panties, messiah-nipple, seventh-grade, goober-whittling, scruple-dink sweater-vest hobo-trigger, nut-kneading, mouth-breathing, pope-diving, womb-sniffing crap I've ever heard.
The album feels lazy. This band would probably snigger at my apocalyptic melodrama, but I wish they'd create a record with the idea that it was their last, and that it had to be as awesome as they could make it. Because this product, as "searchingly" misanthropic and intentionally misproportioned as a Todd Solondz film, constitutes bad faith. I will spare you my Joan of Arc/Pavement analogy, about how they're both "slack," love "wordplay," feature bad singers who are great guitarists, and smirk like nothing is ever at stake, with Pavement's poppiness and cavalier cocksurity distinguishing them, but I will go ahead and say that So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness is a Terror Twilight, a mellow, slightly sub-decent album delivered at the wrong time.
I guarantee that there will never be a point at which you will say, "Oh shit! I've got to play [I Refuse to Type That Album Title Again]!" The world is cray-zy, right, yet when this disc spins, I can only think of speed metal band Death Angel's singular locution, the chorus of the "hit" from their 1988 breakthrough Frolic Through the Park: "I'm bored."
