Can you tell I just got a Teenbeat package in the mail?

From the little bits I’ve heard, The Sisterhood’s first two albums consist more or less of the same googly-eyed “zany” dinking around that made Rob Christiansen’s Viva Satellite records so unnervingly painful. The thing is, I’ve never gotten the impression that Christiansen was forcing his affect; listening to Viva Satellite’s “experiments in narrative” (I forget the exact phrasing, but it says something like that on the case) is like watching Welcome To The Dollhouse with earnest goofiness in place of awkwardness and alienation. It’s just there, whether or not its audience can stomach it.

A track on 555 Records’ 555CD55 made me wonder if the band had changed their stripes, though, and it seems they have; Rob’s wife and partner Jeannine Durfee sings unslickly and Rob’s arrangements bespeak a clear goofy streak, but it’s unceasingly warm and melodic. And the genre-hop to soul for “All You Want To Do Is Make Me Cry” charmed me, like to the point where I don’t know how I’ll keep myself from buying their old records despite the disappointment and vexation that I believe awaits.

Oddly, as Robinson’s design sense gets sharper and lusher, leading to album covers with six or seven different ideas colliding on them and pretty much never flopping, he seems to focus more and more on a musical minimalism that seems resolutely unwilling to play for higher stakes. I feel as though I should like this more than I do.

This remaster fixes the two big problems I had with Mass Romantic, which were that a lot of the lyrics were hard to make out, and that by side two I usually had listening fatigue (despite loving some of the songs found there — shit, “Centre For Holy Wars” and “The Mary Martin Show” are tracks 10 and 11 out of 12). However, it’s WAY too ‘bright’ for my usual stereo, on which this remastered disc crackles in places.

It’s also a mixed blessing to have all the instruments so clearly audible; the barely-concealed fact that the New Pornographers were trying their best to do everything at once helped make the record a hit, but their second album has since showed that they were capable of being even better if they calmed down a tiny bit, and this remastering job demonstrates that a little muddiness the first time around probably constituted a very desirable trade-off of fidelity for accessibility.

In the fall of 1995 I saw the movie Kicking And Screaming, which killed my nascent interest in being a film critic; I discovered while trying to write the piece in time for my editor not to kill me that, unlike with music, I didn’t have much to say about things I didn’t like.

I was haunted for days by a song from the movie, though; I think, in fact, that it was played over the closing credits. Eventually I found out that it was Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation”; I rushed out to get the disc and found that, while I didn’t like most of the rest of it to any great degree, “Bad Reputation” was as moving as it had been in my memory.

I got this when it came out, not much more than a year later, and from the start couldn’t decide whether to keep it or not. The first track has an okay melody but inane lyrics about shoplifting; the rest made no impression.

Today, once again, I found myself face to face with the disc, considering whether or not to sell it off in my huge ongoing purge. Thinking over my history with Johnston, though, I found myself confused about how I could have taken so long to identify “Bad Reputation”.

Then I realized that, though the web already existed in early 1996, there was not yet even a hint of the ability one has today to just type a lyric into a search engine on the assumption that someone, somewhere has transcribed an artist’s whole oeuvre at some point (and be right). Duh.

Having been supplied with that visceral reminder of how long I’d been holding onto this album just in case I turned out to like it, I plunked it right down in the sell pile, where it belongs.

I’ve read some reviews mentioning how strange it is that Murs would make the most ‘normal’ album in the Def Jux catalog; I guess maybe he used to be strange…?

When Murs is on here, his conversational flow is unbeatable. He sounds like he’s just shooting the shit, telling a story and rhyming accidentally, except that between his voice and his attitude you’d want to sit down and just chat with him anyway. However, some of the beats are weak and he doesn’t have such great choruses, which I suppose is the risk you take as a conversational rapper. Still, you want to like the guy and he makes it easy, whether he’s rhyming about collecting Star Wars action figures or apologizing in the liner notes for lyrics that he doesn’t agree with anymore.