The beautiful were never meant to suffer,” Eef Barzelay
announces near the outset of his band Clem Snide’s latest album, The Ghost
of Fashion, before lowering his voice to a whispery ache to complete the
line — “And I’m so beautiful.”
Given the ambiguous tone of most of the band’s music, it makes
sense that we can’t be quite sure where Barzelay is coming from at this moment
— is he honestly lamenting his band’s awkward fate as celebrated fringe-
dwellers or is he merely goofing on it? Either way it’s a fitting statement
for both Clem Snide and the similar band the Ass Ponys, whose own recent
album, Lohio, is also quite beautiful: These groups are saddled with
the honor and curse of being two of the smartest bands in all of
America(na).
Both the New York-based Clem Snide and the Ohio-based Ass Ponys
are indie bands that have recovered from major-label flirtations. The Ass
Ponys put out a couple of records for A&M in the mid-’90s, back when the
majors were drunk on Nirvana and throwing money at indies everywhere. The band
disappeared after 1996’s The Known Universe, assumed dead until they
popped up last year on the Chicago indie label Checkered Past with the strong
comeback Some Stupid With a Flare Gun. Clem Snide put out the perhaps
too-dour Your Favorite Music on Sire just a couple of years ago but
have now found a more comfortable fit with New York’s indie SpinArt.
Clem Snide and the Ass Ponys both play straightforward rock with
a rootsy bent, and both bands employ a wide instrumental palette. The Ass
Ponys are more rock, with lead guitarist Bill Alletzhauser evoking the ragged
glory of Neil Young at times, but they are just as liable to spike their rust-
belt rock with dollops of bluegrass strings, soul organ, or alt-associated
Moog. By contrast, Clem Snide is more atmospheric. The Ghost of
Fashion‘s soundscapes are given an acoustic lilt by the dominant bed of
strings and horns. On the bridge of “Long Lost Twin” these elements
swell to a crescendo that could have been lifted from a Drifters record —
indie rock does “There Goes My Baby.”
But the element that most unites Clem Snide and the Ass Ponys is
their respective frontmen — Barzelay and the Ponys’ Chuck Cleaver are as
smart, idiosyncratic, and observant a pair of rock songwriters as there is
right now, and both, to their credit, find their voice through the camaraderie
and sound-sense of a functioning band. The American underground has long
harbored these kinds of frontmen. The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg is the
model. The Archers of Loaf’s Eric Bachman was a worthy inheritor. The Old 97s’
Rhett Miller is another contemporary example (and he’s currently having his
own major-label flirtation).
But if dissonance and raw attitude were what kept Westerberg and
Bachman from mainstream stardom, then Cleaver and Barzelay have different
commercial handicaps. Though both front bands musical enough to implant hooks
and melodies into your hum matrix, these guys are just too smart (or, some
might say, too smart-alecky) to play it straight. Cleaver and Barzelay have a
way of undermining their own anthems. This strategy — if you can call it that
— is so prevalent on Lohio that it’s almost the album’s theme. Time
and time again the Ass Ponys produce undeniable, almost classic-rock
structures, only to have Cleaver pull them in unusual, if not perverse,
directions.
Lohio‘s jaw-dropping opener, “Last Night It
Snowed,” starts with delicate piano that matches Cleaver’s awestruck
description of the preceding night’s snowfall. But this lovely setting gets an
almost triumphantly sarcastic twist as Cleaver taunts a visitor with the
snowfall’s fleetingness, giving way to morning rain and a landscape
“turned back to gray” as Cleaver’s cold “I told you so”
introduces a barrage of power chords.
“Dried Up” could almost be Cleaver’s own “Night
Moves.” Alletzhauser laces the song with a limber, stomping guitar riff
that could be Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” turned
inside-out, and Cleaver spins a nostalgic coming-of-(sexual)-age tale.
Cleaver’s “I recall the smell of summer on your skin/We were 17 and
everything was pounding and it wouldn’t stop” could have sprung from Bob
Seger’s pen, but it’s doubtful Mr. “Old Time Rock and Roll” would
have tolerated Cleaver’s lovingly sarcastic follow-up — “It’s hard to
put into words what I was thinking then/I don’t know/We were alive or
something.”
And so it goes. “Butterfly” is a rousing classic-rock
anthem that finds sonic middle ground between the Who and the Stones. The song
is a deliciously in-your-face taunt: “Hey man, you wanna be the pilot of
a kamikaze aeroplane/Instead, I bet you’re gonna add it to a list of things
you never tried/You’re a fifth wheel, a fourth-class, third-string, second-
rate kind of guy.” “Nothing Starts Today” is a gentle acoustic
gem on a par with the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” but it’s really an ode
to procrastination and atrophy.
Clem Snide is less prone to that kind of rock grandeur, but when
they do channel it, as on the beautiful, soaring “Moment In the
Sun,” Barzelay undercuts the aural command even more perversely. In this
case, Barzelay plays it straight enough vocally to keep you guessing, but the
song itself is deeply, deeply sarcastic. In a first-person confessional
reportedly inspired by folkie-cum-poet babe Jewel, Barzelay sings, “I
have a lot of things to say/And you’d be wise to listen good/I think that
hunger, war, and death/Are bringing everybody down/La, la, la, la, la,
la.”
But Barzelay and Cleaver aren’t just wiseacres. In fact, these
two songwriters both have a penchant for combining pop-culture references with
deeply felt emotional truths. On “Kung Fu Reference,” Cleaver
documents a mundane night of slackerdom with something like the oddball wonder
that R.E.M. brought to “Man On the Moon,” matter-of-factly setting
the scene with this — “Big evening up ahead/A wide array of
choices/Blade Runner, RoboCop, or The Bride of
Frankenstein.” Barzelay offers a devastatingly lovely reverie to a
high school girlfriend with the arch title “Joan Jett of Arc” —
reliving his ’80s youth with these fondly referential lines: “My black
heart was heavy/Her mom’s Couger was fast/As ‘Little Pink Houses’ was
whistled/And it was all-you-can-eat at the Sizzler that night/My steak-burning
Joan Jett of Arc.”
But despite their many similarities, Cleaver and Barzelay are
still quite different songwriters. Barzelay is a wit, master of the clever
one-liner. On “Long Lost Twin” he hitches almost the entire song to
the unforgettable line “Tonight I feel like Elvis longing for his long-
lost twin.” Cleaver, on the other hand, is more of a pop-song short story
writer, observing and documenting the bizarre yet literal with a flair that
compares favorably to songwriters as diverse as Tom T. Hall and Freedy
Johnston.
And the two men’s takes on romance are decidedly different.
Cleaver takes pleasure in exploring romantic wreckage in concise, vivid
lyrical strokes. He lassos the scorching tempo of “Only” just long
enough to plead, “Please don’t kick my busted heart too far,” while
the delicate fiddle melody of “Calendar Days” provides a backdrop to
a similar romantic query — “Do I still exist in the bottomless pit of
your heart?” Barzelay’s romantic entanglements are less devastated, more
playful, and more, well, snide — sex talk for bookworms. On “Don’t Be
Afraid of Your Anger” he snaps at a romantic sparring partner,
“Well, your tongue can get sharp/But it’s soft in my mouth.” On the
solo centerpiece “The Curse of Great Beauty,” the difference between
spiteful insult and sly come-on dissolves as Barzelay sweet-talks his object
of desire: “Those paper cuts kept you from writing a poem so epic and
true/About how you are cursed with a beauty so great/I’m sure that it’s hard
being you/So put down that book, it’s too serious/I’ll undress you as I make a
joke.”
With The Ghost of Fashion and Lohio, Clem Snide and
the Ass Ponys have released what are likely career peaks and certainly two of
the year’s best albums. Clem Snide — despite their recent drop from the
majors to an indie and probably due in part to their proximity to cultural
tastemakers in New York — are something of a buzz band. The Ass Ponys,
despite a positive review in the latest Rolling Stone, are often
ignored. Their Ohio base probably doesn’t help, but I blame their awful
moniker: For years I’ve had to deflect guffaws and rolling eyes whenever I’d
proffer that a group called the Ass Ponys might be one of America’s finest
rock bands. But neither of these bands is getting rich and famous, and that’s
too bad, because, with these two splendid records, Clem Snide and the Ass
Ponys have crafted brilliant “heartland rock” for people who smirk
at the term, and, if Cleaver and Barzelay get what they deserve, maybe even
for people who don’t.
You can e-mail Chris Herrington at herrington@memphisflyer.com.
