Eef Barzalay isn't as weird as he'd like you to think; he's just another quirky singer-songwriter trying to figure out how the universe works. But his insights are filtered through a very personal perspective and come out his mouth as lyrics that are skewed, surreal, and often humorous. On Clem Snide's fifth album, End of Love, he sings about the nature of love and the mysterious doings of God. On the title track, love becomes just another hipster trend, a comparison that gives Barzalay the opportunity to scold a fickle trend-follower ("You're the first to know when a movement's come and gone") and observe that "no one will survive the End of Love." On "Jews for Jesus Blues", he peruses the promises of Christianity and realizes "now that I'm saved I miss being lost." And he tries to answer the age-old question, Why do bad things happen to good people?, on "God Answers Back", and comes up with something much better than, say, "God Shuffled His Feet": "Your blood will color every sunset/ Your tears will help Me grow some trees."
These are big big issues (are there any bigger?), inspired by the deaths of his mother and his mother-in-law. But Barzalay works better with small moments, things that everyone experiences but few actually take time to consider. Through these instances (as on "Joan Jett of Arc" from The Ghost of Fashion and "Made for TV Movie" from End of Love) he catches brief glimpses of life and death but only hints at their dwarfing magnitude. When he faces them head-on, they ironically become smaller in scale-- less daunting and therefore less affecting.
So End of Love isn't Barzalay's best collection of songs, and the production tends to gloss over the instruments so songs like "Collapse" and "When We Become" sound subdued and blandly unobtrusive. Still, the album has some unaffected gems, including closer "Weird", which sounds like it was recorded during a party and effortlessly pops the bubbles of the self-proclaimed oddballs who "aren't as weird as you'd like me to think." Best of all is the quiet "Made for TV Movie", in which a Lucille Ball biopic inspired a Tolstoyian revelation: "They would never make a movie if everything was great/ Because happiness is boring."
What makes "Made for TV Movie" so sublime (in the sense of both overwhelming and mortally terrifying) isn't the playful songwriting, but the sound. An unidentified young girl, no more than four or five, sings on the bridge, a couple of measures of wordless la la las. But she's utterly charming, not only in her innocently arhythmic delivery but in the reaction she solicits from Barzalay. He turns his attention from the microphone to the child, and the world closes in around them. It's maybe the most intimate moment captured on a Clem Snide album-- completely unrehearsed, unaffected, and endearing.
