Clem Snide
Hungry Bird
(429 Records, 2009)

When I talked to Eef Barzelay last June, he was promoting his pretty good second solo record (Lose Big) and had included “Me No”, the opening track from Hungry Bird, as a bonus track, probably because he didn’t expect this project to see the light of day anytime soon. Clem Snide was somewhat officially “broken up,” and in the worst way; the music was there but the members weren’t, spread out geographically and without enough money to pay everyone or get this already-recorded record out. But he was pretty stoked to get this album released and threw around the descriptors “conceptual” and “apocalyptic.” Considering how much I loved the band’s last record, 2005’s miraculous End of Love, which was pretty grandiose and apocalyptic in itself, I was moderately excited for these wry low-key twangers’ idea of a rock opera.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know their idea of a rock opera was the worst kind (though all rock operas are pretty bad). But this is the kind with an eight-minute song named “Pray.” Hoping for a relief from the Nick Drake spareness of Barzelay’s solo records (the first of which, Bitter Honey, was as charming and excellent as anything he’s done with the band), it instead turns out that Hungry Bird is barren even by Snide standards. Of the two “rock” songs, one is “Me No”, which works better as a bonus track than a weight-of-the-world apoc-rock opera opener, and the other is “The Endless Endings”, a horrible pastiche between gothic moan-folk and Alice in Chains-style crunching with a wall of Eefs wailing over it inescapably. The rest is slow, slow, slow. While that’s nothing new for fans of the band, the apparent lack of interest in wit, subtle arrangements, or the Willie Nelson twang-lilt that used to function as a puddle-thin groove they could glide over certainly is, and disappointingly.

“Beard of Bees” and “With All My Heart” gently muster something like old times, but this is severely underwrought if anything. Barzelay is just plugging in and tuning out when he tries to write spare here; nothing approaches the dilapidated sweetness of previous slow-plucked successes “Little Red Dot” or “Made for TV Movie.” And while 2000’s Your Favorite Music felt so weightless it could float away at times, it was a uniquely funny and touching record, with tunes about girls who smell like bread and feeling too white. End of Love blew their strange brand of humor wide open with Technicolor sound and theatrics: Babies crying, pedophiles singing “You’ve Got a Friend”, Ricky beating Lucy like “a conga drum,” and girls who aren’t as weird as they think (whose dads like to drink). But it sapped Barzelay. Hungry Bird has songs about who knows what… grandiose codas themselves, unsolicited piano balladry, a spoken interlude, and a girl whose “secrets were told by a drunken poet.” Clem Snide’s worst album is an unfortunate mess. And he did seem to run into trouble trying to explain the thing.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Tags: Clem Snide, Eef Barzelay, 429 Records

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