Fresh from winning the PEN memoir award, the narcoleptically self-editing Rick Moody published a piece about Magnetic Fields fandom in the new and impressive McSweeney's spinoff The Believer which contained a typically lazy and hyperbolic sentence about his stint opening for the band: "There is nothing harder than trying to bring fiction, literature, words, to the mass audience, even as refined an audience as the one that comes to a Magnetic Fields gig." Bullshanks! I and my syphilitic manservant can think of 1.3 million things more difficult than being paid to blather one's sub-lofty scribing in the Beirutian gauntlet that is Some Metropole's rock club.
Yet: a vulnerable cluster of my unplucked heartstrings can sympathize with the Moody Fucker (s'a fantastic Lambchop song, download it posthaste), for I have spent a week being all downcast about the suckiness of Clem Snide's Soft Spot, as if my no-eye-contact-making doctor had told me I'd developed lymphoma of the haircut. "What's the matter with you?" my chums ask as I sulk and mix vodka and gin to create godka. "The new Clem Snide ain't no good," I reply more morbidly than when I read about the Iraqi family killed trying to put out fires in a wheat field that set by Amer'kin flares. O, how fake tragedies abound in our leisure federation.
During the poet Walt Whitman's autopsy, a lab worker Frankensteinly dropped his brain on his floor, kersplatting it. Sometime during the birth of Clem Snide frontman Eef Barzelay's son, Eef's brain similarly slid from its post and into history's chumbucket. The once-clever-and-cleverer songwriter has somehow become a saptician on par with John Denver. Let's let "Fontanelle" speak for itself: "May the sun always shine on you/ And each day feel so bright and new/ And may god hold you in the palm of his hand/ May the moon always light your way/ And love be forever here to stay/ And may God..." and then the palm thing again.
Is this kind of devolution hormonal? Can't a savvy rocker tiptoe onto the frontier of marriage and family without becoming a Mormon? Here's more syrup, from (hack) "Every Moment": "Everything that lives will someday die/ But our love still grows/ Because every moment must make way for one that's new/ Before it does, remember I love you." Please, Eef, don't hurt 'em! For a response to Mr. Barzelay's epiphany that mortals die and that time passes, I'll cite a reviewer of Albert Camus' similarly obvious novel The Fall: "One might define stupidity as the state of needing to be told this."
Soft Spot lacks all that was adventurous/ponderous about Snide's last mega-durable outing The Ghost of Fashion. The guitar melodies severely underplink their goal of conveying moist nuggets of enlightened bliss. Jason Glasser goes gymkata with the multi-instrumentalism, frontloading this pace-challenged album with bells and strings and bloops that suggest "subtle interplay" but ultimately register as a kind of overcompensation for the lack of gripping songcraft. The scattershot laptop scrackle connotes a Yankee Timeshare Foxtrot.
Nothing here stakes a claim on the listener's hungry memory with the fury of Ghost's domestic violence vow "Don't Be Afraid of Your Anger" or the ironist anthem "No One's More Happy Than You". Like an NBC-sitcom-theme-spewing doppelganger of John Cusack, Barzelay openly cites Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Smog as his fave contemporary influences (Ghost's "Curse of Great Beauty" all but presages Oldham's "Careless Love"), yet he over-relies on the preciousness of his sexy-Kermit vocals to carry unrigorous, sentimental lyrics.
The Rembrandts drums and E Street guitar tone of "Happy Birthday" are atrociously cubicle-friendly, ruining the song's choice line about Eef wishing his son's girlfriends "wear tight pants." Does this band really plan to tour to support this Hallmark bore? When will Eef resume his old wordplay, or even his wail? I'd rather he go back to wearing his frontal lobe on his sleeve, and interchange "officer" and "orifice," or point out how "embargo" backwards is "o grab me." On the album The Known Unsoldier: Sick of Waging War, Sage Francis raps a supreme diss about someone's album being so bad that the whole thing should have been a hidden bonus track. The slam applies to Soft Spot, which at best begs to be a fan-club download, since it offers so little to anyone not Eef's bride or offspring. "We'll soon make memories of things to come/ Time will pass." Tell me about it. The future is tomorrow. Peace will come when the fighting stops.
Now, I have held a baby, and found it so pacifying and reprioritizing that I dreamt of a world in which an hour of baby-holding was a requirement for troubled inner-city youth, to enforce some foggy notion of life's sanctity. But then I remembered that many inner-city youths have already squirted kids into the world, and they still can't dream beyond the homicidal grudges of their 'hood. So Eef must do more than sing (on "Close the Door") about how God made the dust that makes his rugrat sneeze.
Soft Spot is sweetly conceived, but bullyingly so, like disgusting birthday-prompted vegan cookies that one feels bound to eat. It thinks its premise is invulnerable, like those Michelin commercials with the babies sitting on the tires that beg the question, "What? Do you hate babies, you shitassed FREAK?" Some may praise Eef for letting down his pun-loving, pop-culture-referencing guard, but this attempt at straight-shooting is so artless that I'm filing at as reason #3968 for my lack of faith in upright mammals. "Let's take off our shoes and dance away the blues": Bob Seger, Jimmy Buffett, Eef Barzelay... feel the oneness.
