After about seven years of silence, there's suddenly been a virtual flood of Daniel Johnston material. First, there was last year's surprisingly coherent and successful Rejected Unknown, followed by the reissue of Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston's 1989 collaboration, It's Spooky. A recent Target ad even featured Mary Lou Lord covering his "Speedy Motorcycle." And now comes The Lucky Sperms: Somewhat Humorous, the second such joint effort between Texas' favorite Captain America-worshiping troubadour of questionable mental stability and the bespectacled Half Japanese founder and Harry Potter look-a-like Jad Fair.
Anyone familiar with the previous collaboration between these two-- or any of their other projects, really-- probably knows what to expect with this one: rag-tag, shambling songs, most sounding half-completed, and judging from the fidelity, recorded on a Talk Boy. The secondary title of this album has it just about right: "somewhat humorous." Somewhat annoying, somewhat brilliant, and somewhat scary, are also good ways to describe it.
In a lot of ways, The Lucky Sperms sounds pretty tossed-off, interspersing maybe some leftover stuff Johnston recorded during the last seven years with a few random Jad Fair tracks, which isn't a totally bad thing. Johnston, whose material comprises about half the album, starts us off with "Movie," a typical-- and typically moving-- piano-based ode to unrequited love and melancholia. The harrowing "Death" follows, offering vivid glimpses into Johnston's idiosyncratic and highly-developed mythic system.
Jad, for his part, serves up five noisy, stomping counterparts to Johnston's piano melodies. He also handles the album's production, if you want to call it that. His first contribution, "Yes, We Can," sounds more than a little like a Johnston tune, at least thematically, contemplating Batman's relative power and recalling, "'What power is in the words,'/ The Byrds asked Bob Dylan." "Coffee Cup," meanwhile, relates that "Peter Pan refused to grow up/ I want more coffee in my coffee mug/ If you want treasure you've got to dug/ You've got to dug ya dig?" And what can you really say about that? A truism if there ever was one.
Mid-album, the guys also pull out their covers, including the Beatles' "Michelle" and the Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" back-to-back. The former is given and laid back with an almost reggae rhythm and the French lyrics hilariously slurred through, and "Ruby Tuesday" is given a barrelhouse piano reading by Johnston. Near the end of the album, they throw together a medley of standards and not-so-standards called "Melody," featuring bits and pieces of "On Top of Old Smokey," Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge over Troubled Water," Aerosmith's "Take Me to the Other Side," "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Ding-Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead," among others. But even these pleasures are short lived. They're enjoyable enough in the moment, but like the album as a whole, I can't say I'll be making the return trip very often.
