I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BARENAKED LADIES-Gordon (1992) & Maybe You Should Drive (1994).

I first learned about Barenaked Ladies from a friend of a friend in college, whose name I don’t remember. Oh, and the original friend (whose name I do remember) I’ve lost touch with. So BNL outlasted all of them.

This fellow described them as being very funny and no doubt alluded to “If I Had $1,000,000” and “Be My Yoko Ono.” Now, I enjoy funny songs, so I figured I had to check them out. I was initially disappointed with Gordon because it’s not really funny. It’s definitely a light-hearted album with some funny lines in songs, but it’s not comedy rock. Of course, any band of 5 guys who call themselves “Barenaked Ladies” is not going to be serious, right?I have since grown to appreciate the vast difference between comedy rock and witty, funny songs. (Usually, you have more tolerance for the witty, funny songs. Or at least I do.)

As of this writing, I’ve seen BNL live about five times. Their stage shows are really great. I was able to see them just before they got huge (with the release of “One Week”) and, of course, right afterwards, when their audience became surprisingly filled with frat boys.

After “One Week” BNL was pretty much written off as a one-hit wonder novelty band, a tag they have been labeled with for pretty much their whole career, which would probably be weird, if they didn’t seem to embrace it so well.

BNL recently switched to releasing their own records (before Radiohead did their grand experiment–even if it wasn’t quite as grand as Radiohead’s downloadable disc), so I thought I’d review their oeuvre and see if they’ve changed much. I felt that their recent records were a bit too mellow for these guys, but I was surprised at what I found upon re-listening.

Gordon.
It’s funny to hear how almost two-dimensional the sound of this record is. As the band progressed, their sound got a lot fuller, and Jim Greeggan’s bass really began to stand out. But on Gordon, it’s a rather tinny affair. Many of the songs are witty, if not funny, and they are not afraid to skewer (comparatively easy) targets (New Kids on the Block, Yoko Ono).

There are of course the funny songs (“Grade 9” with a great Rush shout-out , “$1,000,000” of course). But what is surprising is the depth of some of the tracks; beautiful ballads of lost love, which is quite a theme of the band.

And, lest we forget, the melodies and harmonies are top-notch, something which elevates them above the “novelty” tag. There’s a couple of clunkers in the set, which tend to be a few mellow tracks where the melody just sort of drifts into the ether (perhaps a stab at adulthood) but overall Gordon is a keeper.

The cover photo is the reissued CD. I suppose just looking at the original cover is reason enough to see why they’d change it, but I don’t quite get the whole “Pepsi ball” look that the new cover has. The original cover is here in my review of The Beautiful South(because “Hello City” has an awesome Housemartins shout out).

Maybe You Should Drive.
I’ve always sort of overlooked this album. I think it’s because I don’t really like the cover (now that’s one they should change). But listening to it today, I realized the album is like a magical leap through flaming hoops in terms of song quality. This album is packed with great songs that are simultaneously heartfelt and silly/witty. It’s a rare skill for a songwriter to thread this needle so delicately (and BNL have two!).

“Jane” opens the CD: a really beautiful song of falling for a girl at a store (while I shopped/shoplifted there). There’s a nice, dated pop culture reference to Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield, just to take some of the seriousness off. “These Apples” is a fantastic rocker with a great bridge and some really funny lyrics, that again, aren’t funny ha ha so much as ruefully funny (he shaves her name into her head but misspells it), and it has a chorus that I feel I only recently got: “These apples are delicious. As a matter of fact, they are, she said.”

“A” is another great funny song of romance, with a list of things that start with A. So damned catchy, these Canucks. “Alternative Girlfriend” has made many a mix tape better, and Sarah and I really enjoy that one, along with “Life, in a Nutshell” which has our favorite line “when we are happy, we both get fat”.

As with all of their records, a couple songs don’t really work. Jim Creeggan’s “Little Tiny Song” overstays its welcome even at only a minute long. And a few other songs just don’t stand up to the rest. Once again, there are a couple of “mature” songs that tend to be too quiet for their own good. I know that when you have a group of noisy/silly/fun songs, that a slow breather can be a nice juxtaposition, but it seems that for BNL, they go so far into the mellow, that there songs just get lost. Nevertheless, this a great set, deserving of more recognition. And a better cover.

[READ: December 13, 2007] Glove Pond.

The left cover image above is a still from the promotional videos on Coupland’s My Space site, and on the Crush Inc. site.  The black cover is the one from the box set.

This book is the story that Roger’s character in Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief is writing. It is available as its own entity only in the box set edition of The Gum Thief. Much to my utter utter disappoinment, there is nothing different at all about this edition of Glove Pond from what is written in The Gum Thief. So, if you’re looking for anything special: easter eggs, an extra chapter, anything–don’t bother! (Although the box set edition of Gum Thief is autographed). It is exactly the same, including the crossed out lines in the story. I’m not sure if I misunderstood, or just couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t make it worth our while to get this extra volume. But boo, me!
So, with that out of the way, how do you review a fictional character’s story? Well, I’ll take it straight.

Glove Pond is an homage, I would say, to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. An older, married couple (Steve and Gloria…he is the head of the English department at his “prestigious” university and a writer of five unpopular novels; she imagines herself an actress) have invited a young, married couple for dinner (Kyle and Brittany… he has written one hugely succesful book and she is a brain surgeon). The reason for their invite is unclear, as they are terribly insular, although it has something to do with departmental politics.

Steve and Gloria had a traumatic event happen in their family in the mid 1970s, at which time their life, and their house, essentially froze. When Kyle and Brittany arrive, they are appalled to discover the house with dust as thick as a pool table’s felt on most surfaces. And, they are even more shocked to discover that the only food that is in the house is moldy cheese and 6 year old Triscuits. Steve and Gloria subsist pretty much exclusively on Scotch(and occasionally Gin).

As in Virginia Woolf, there is witty, abusive banter, jealousy of both youth and success, and of course, the revealing moment where someone is bound to say, “Don’t talk about our son, Martha.” (Okay that’s a paraphrase, much like, “Play it again, Sam”). We trust it is an homage to Virginia Woolf because Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are mentioned as cultural references.

The story is very short (about 85 pages) and ends on a somewhat positive note, at least as far as these people’s miserable lives are concerned. Even though Steve and Gloria are ogres, they come out of the story with a somewhat happy moment together (their first in the book). But with Kyle and Brittany, Brittany is so disgusted at being a trophy wife that she simply walks away from the life she knows, leaving Kyle, basically, lost in someone else’s house.

As for content of the book: The story also plays fun with consumer culture. Kyle’s latest book is set in a Staples, and it is fun to see the time-warped hosts realizing they have no idea what a office superstore is, much less what Post It’s are. And yet their own egos will not let them admit as much. Steve and Gloria speak in a tone that is ostenatatious and out-dated, a terribly humorous combination. And, one assumes, Thorpe intended their banter to sound forced and ridiculous.

The story also aludes back to The Gum Thief. Events in Coupland’s book resonate within the pages of Glove Pond. In The Gum Thief, a character’s brother commits suicide by hanging himself with an electrical cord. In Glove Pond, a lone electrical cord is found where one of the characters is searching for meaning. No further mention is made of the electrical cord, which is certainly puzzling if you have not read The Gum Thief. However, the story itself contains enough cryptic writing that it is not always clear how much we are meant to “get” from the story, and how much is really just a personal story to be shared by the author and a friend.

For a first novel, Thorpe’s writing is crisp and clean, if not a little derivative. Glove Pond fares a little better than Kyle’s story within the story Love in the Age of Office Superstores, which is rather pretentious. However, I assume that that is Thorpe’s way of getting back at all of the young pretentious kids that he worked with at Staples who thought they were better than him.