Kimya Dawson's move to K Records was perhaps inevitable. Her work with The Moldy Peaches has always been indebted to K cornerstone Beat Happening, and the withdrawn folk of her three previous solo albums would fit snugly beside the twee that has long clogged that label's roster. But Dawson has always channeled the confrontational energy of her work with Adam Green into her otherwise innocuous solo material, and tempers her wide-eyed sincerity with a deeply sardonic sensibility. The success of her music is blocked by two equally formidable limitations: Her rudimentary guitar arrangements and hoarse, adolescent voice are at high risk of producing cloying results, and the remnants of affected hostility from her Moldy Peaches days add yet another potential layer of unpleasantness.
Her work has been compelling when her balance between cynical disaffection and childish naivete is in constant flux. Her 2002 debut I'm Sorry That Sometimes I'm Mean sounds like a journal entry from the bedroom of a Gen-Xer in arrested development, infusing a cynical post-adolescent assessment of the world at large with the comforting Casiotones and music box chimes of childhood. The sonic construction of Hidden Vagenda reveals a discernible maturation-- Dawson's arrangements here are her most complex to date, adding a diverse collection of instrumentalists and vocalists to her typically bare-bones production. Lyrically, however, Dawson seems trapped in the narrow confines of her conceptual focus. Hidden Vagenda attempts to disguise itself as a concept album of sorts, using the current American political landscape as an imprecise template for foreboding tales of death, capitalist opportunism, and the destruction of family and community, all told through the filter of juvenilia artifice.
Dawson's choice to directly engage current events is a gamble that ultimately fails. Her simple musical approach works well to illustrate broad concepts, such as the child-like rumination on death in "It's Been Raining", but falls flat in the face of events whose magnitude overshadow casual introspection. It's difficult to empathize with Dawson's response to the 9/11 attacks in "Anthrax (Power Ballad Version)" ("We turned on CNN/ Watched the towers fall again/ And realized our lives weren't so bad") when her tone is so ambivalent. Her political commentary consistently falls flat: Her token laundry list of Bush-era grievances in "Viva La Persistence" encompasses everything from colonial imperialism to Vanilla Coke, but her intentional lack of mature insight-- a natural result of her conceptual approach-- quickly becomes exasperating, particularly in the song's most juvenile moments ("Would I choose deep-fried apathy/ McNuggets where my balls should be/ Or supersized conformity?").
However, most of the album avoids awkward political sentiment, and many of these tracks stand out musically as Dawson's strongest material. The disconcerting group sing-along "I Will Never Forget" employs tympani, strings, and music box ornamentation to add a newfound richness to her tortured recollections of childhood. The silly bicycle bells and oompah horn section of "Parade" complement the song's surreal urban imagery, and languid alt-country closer "Angels and Seagulls" is sarcastic but strangely calming; Dawson delights in the prospect of solitude that drowning might provide.
Though the jump to a new label has allowed Dawson a fuller and more rewarding production style, she is still far from perfecting a persona that, in all likelihood, will always seem somewhat disingenuous. Hidden Vagenda is elegantly constructed and outwardly naive, but it lacks a consistent underlying honesty. Despite her evocation of youth, Dawson still frequently comes across as jaded, and the conflict that arises from this clash-- though intermittently compelling-- deprives Hidden Vagenda of the sincerity the material deserves.
