F.M. Cornog has it pretty good. He's got a good 9-to-5 in a recession economy, working the tiling department at a Home Depot somewhere in New Jersey, and he comes home to his wife and an eight-year-old daughter. When he gets the itch, he writes and records in his simple home studio. When he wants to put out a record-- something that is happening with less frequency thanks to that day job-- he has a sweet deal with one of the biggest indie labels around, which seems committed to him into perpetuity and never asks him to tour. Not bad for a guy whose career-defining story involves an epic drug binge and a kindhearted rescue from the Hoboken train station. While some artists chafe against the strictures of domesticity, Cornog thrives behind the orange apron.
His imagination, however, is out there treading dingy sidewalks and haunting abandoned strip malls, taking in the saddest vistas of the Garden State. His seventh album, the gently elegaic We Live in Rented Rooms, is populated with junkies and clock-punchers, conmen and dead-enders looking for a hit or a job or just a break from drab misery. Some find it in crime or drugs, others in Internet porn or philosophy. "Conman" ends with the threat of murder, which is both ominous and humdrum, as if it's an everyday occurrence. Closer "Three Ships" intimates a big-box apocalypse, embraced by the narrator rather than feared. Cornog sympathizes with them all, inhabiting his characters as if they were simply different aspects of himself-- or different outcomes to his own story. Never straining for credibility, he conjures these people with a lyrical economy that suggests the realism of Robert Frank-- quick snapshots of Ameicans struggling in and with America.
Forgoing the bitterness that made 2006's What Are You On sound so tinny and doomed, We Live in Rented Rooms, despite its endtimes stoicism, may be Cornog's highest-fi album to date. Either he's seriously upgraded his home studio or he's figured out new ways to get a wider array of sounds out of his signature Tascam 388. Synths still form the foundations for these songs, and he adds texture with sharply resonating guitars on "Backroom Deals", a Lennonesque piano on "When You Were Doing Cocaine", and what at times sound like real live drums. Rather than slick, it's simply more vivid, adding a sense of keen majesty to "Cold Ground" and a long, sad fade-out to "The Flames Are Coming Back". His songs remain epics in miniature, yet the details are finer and more varied, as if he's switched film stock. The would-be filmmaker in "Tommy Made a Movie" keeps his movies in his head, "where no one can touch it or the change around the words." Cornog understands art as a solitary pursuit, made by and ultimately for only one person. Is that song autobiographical? Does Cornog care if anyone outside his home hears his music? Who can say for certain, but we're better off having heard it.
