Clem Snide
Your Favorite Music
[Sire]
Rating: 2.1
True, Clem Snide's music shares similar funhouse-mirrored folk/bizarro-country
concepts with the likes of veterans Lambchop and Palace. Unlike the great
Lambchop, however, Clem Snide's contribution to the Snore-core movement
features little but silly, oblique wordplay with music as mere afterthought:
lethargic bass lines, barely-strummed C, G and F chords, maybe some morbid
violin accompaniment. In the end, you're left with a boring, vague abstraction
of country music. I'm not saying these guys have to necessarily choose between
complete sincerity and over-the-top Ray Stevens parody. But can't we be
entertained without forcing ourselves to accept these overbearing attempts at
being "different?"
Yesiree, NYC's Clem Snide seems targeted for Next Different Thing greatness.
They've also been ludicrously compared to both Hank Williams and Jonathan
Richman. Your Favorite Music has even been likened to the Velvet
Underground's eponymous 1969 album. Insane! And sorry, but dopey, meandering
songs like "The Dairy Queen," featuring mundane slices of small-town teen life,
can't even compare to the best of Don Williams, much less the worst of Hank.
As for the Richman comparisons? Listen to Jonathan Goes Country, then
see if you can keep a straight face while discussing Clem Snide's inherent
genius.
It seems Clem Snide have squeezed themselves into the perfect hip micro-genre.
Uh, let's say... lo-fi post-irony country vaudeville. Much like the empty
conceptualist/visual ironist Damien Hirst, the band thrives simply on their
acquired Next Different Thing status. The lead singer even has a "different"
name: Eef. And enduring his grating faux-country nasal drone, coupled with
the band's constant struggle to merely change chords, is like being subjected
to the never-ending slow drip of a leaky faucet.
Lyrics like "Tonight we're gonna party like its 1989," and "How's that Deep
Purple record I hummed in your ear/ Like a fight song whispered through a
pillow," beg for laugh tracks. Worse yet, Eef sings all this nonsense with
utmost deadpan detachment and exaggerated apathy; which, in the indie
community, is often confused with charm. Funny thing about Eef, though: he's
misanthropic and cynical as hell, albeit in his own insidiously subtle, "aw,
shucks" sort of way. Take the sarcastic "African Friend," for instance. The
singer intimates that his girlfriend is insecure with her pigmentally-challenged
self. She becomes interested in a more "exotic" person of color. Be yourself,
says the threatened boyfriend, and come back to the sensitive everyday white
dude: "Come lay on the couch with me/ We don't have to work on our tans." I
ask you, America, is this funny?
"I Love the Unknown" pokes fun at a drifter type whose excuse for eluding
responsibility and relationships is found in the song's title. The title
track is, for lack of a more obnoxious critical categorization, repetitive
irony-drenched neo-folk trip-hop. Here, Eef, ever the elitist gonzo philosopher,
derides a female whose tenuous hold on individuality is wrapped up in listening
to sad, obscure music: "Your favorite music/ Well, it just makes you sad/ But
you like it/ 'Cause you feel special that way.../ I can't teach you to learn
to love yourself." Ahh.
The lyrics, at best, seem coughed up in a random stream-of-semi-consciousness:
"roads paved with liver and onions"; "your heart's a muscle, that's all";
"jumping jacks could ease your mind"; "you smell like bread"; "cutting my
teeth on her shoulders." And once you've made it as far as their seemingly
faithful cover of Richie Valens' "Donna," the album's relentless
tongue-in-cheekiness has warped your judgment: should I be enjoying this as
a serious cover? And if I like it, will I be secretly mocked by the band?
Your Favorite Music is nothing more than a bad joke; one your favorite
neighborhood hipsters pretend to get, for fear of being ostracized by whatever
indie-centric social milieu their lives depend on. If you're an outcast like
me, you don't mind admitting these songs aren't even as childishly amusing as
your roommate's new architecturally-unsound haircut. You really wonder, then,
how a band this dreadful can be deemed to possess such genius, and gain such
a following. Then again, consider how we ended up with Jim "Ernest" Varney as
our president. The Age of Idiocy is upon us, folks. We've got 'ol figurehead
Dubya, his band of faux-Christian lunatics, and pseudo-musicians like Clem
Snide all on the same path to world domination, fooling the easily-duped
masses every step of the way. Big time.
-Michael Sandlin