Let's take a moment to discuss Clem Snide's last record, Your Favorite Music, which was loved by many. I've dubbed it the Chariots of Fire of my personal collection. Its heavy, damn near maniacal use of cello might have made the group a little different, but the disc seemed to work along the same lines as all those records from the early sixties, in which teen rockers graduated to strings. Each song begged for words like "classy" or "sophisticated" to be thrown at it. Even more unsettling was the band's "poetry", which came the William S. Burroughs way -- randomly, pasted together line by line from some imaginary anthology of alt-rock surrealism.
I had no reason to expect a whole new musical world on The Ghost of Fashion. For one, the album was released just a year after Music, and two, the band members are not twenty-year olds. They've been together since the early nineties, and one would expect, by now, that their artistic leaps would come in smaller gradations, like the tiptoes in the right direction made by Marshall Crenshaw. Instead, The Ghost of Fashion is an album where everything comes together like two nouns in a book about fucking. The relationship between the music and the lyrics is appropriate and natural, while the highly imaginative wordplay ("And it was 'all you can eat' at the Sizzler that night/ My steak-burning Joan Jett of Arc") even falls nicely on the printed page. Place the best phrases from any of these songs ("Corey Feldman took the stand...the Red Sea parted in his veins...the Junky Jews, so much to lose") side by side, and you have images to burn the night away. I can go on and on about the well-versed moments ("A beautiful hackie sack night, two teenagers kiss and hold tight/The satellite swimming above, is sending a message of love") the band brings to life. As it's so rare to find musicians who can separate their "good" from their "best", I was most impressed by the way their best lyric lines are repeated most frequently. In "Let's Explode", the opener, Eef Barzelay bellows and bellows the choicest, most economical phrase ("And I don't wanna know me better"), attacking both the listener and life in general; in "Ice Cube", he wades coolly through a stream of similar-themed metaphors, but barks the one that best evokes his desperation ("I feel like an ice cube in your glass/Melting away"). You don't forget it. If Paul Westerberg ever rewrote "Unsatisfied", he'd be more than pleased to come up with "Ice Cube".
And the music? It's all so wonderfully realized. The man behind that once-omnipresent cello, Jason Glasser, is now their producer, and his primary focus seems to be "cello-restraint"! Clem Snide also make better use of their horn section than any other rock band in recent memory. The trumpet and sax seem more integral and more attuned to the songs here than on James Brown's funk. And everything -- yes, everything -- is just so honest, soulful and as timelessly poetic as a raft on the Misssissippi River. You can compare any shadow from these Ghost songs to the experience believers might get when confessing to God; everything is emptied out, sometimes painfully, but by the conclusion of the ceremony or the song, it is all mysteriously made whole again. And, really, I think it's appropriate to end on some mystical note, because it's not every day or every year when a group improves this much. The band deserves to be huge.
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