By Dale Nixon
Remember in the 80's when you could look at an album cover and somehow know the record inside sucked solely from the packaging and artwork?
That feeling resurfaced upon opening the envelope with the new Ted Leo & the Pharmacists CD Living with the Living. The cover art vaguely resembles something that might have been sketched by a Haitian delirious and dehydrated after crossing the Caribbean on a discarded shipping pallet while escaping from the tonton macoute.
Unfortunately, the shuttering of previous record label Lookout Records could not kill off this pretentious band of chickenhawkish indie rock geeks. Of course, the American Apparel-sponsored sect at Pitchforkmedia.com sees fit to dissect this like a frog in seventh grade biology class (here) and pontificate over alleged brilliance and social relevance, while incorporating thesaurus words and inappropriate phrasing such as “intellectual populists, oeuvre, big-hearted emotional openness, jeremiad, fastidious, unabashed big-ness, molting”
Now, I'm surely not the one to remind Pitchfork minion Jess Leavell that those words and phrases have no place in a music review. We shall leave that to his (or her?) editor. But the Nixon Now sloganeering surely could have been stricken from the record:
“Call me a booster rather than a critic, but I love Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and seriously want this band be, like, fucking huge.”
“I like that he sees writing the most compassionate song possible about eating disorders as a political act, because it is.”
“no rock band currently touring puts on a better live show than the Pharmacists.”
There it is, in three sentences or less. The alleged critic has completely and irrevocably decimated his/her own credibility, while offering precisely nothing in terms of a supporting argument. Jess must have been stricken with mono during the “supporting your thesis” segment of AP English.
As for Ted's pseudo-rockery, frankly, I'd rather have flaming cocktail sandwich toothpicks hammered into my testicles with a miniature croquet mallet than suffer through the whole album.
Although I'm of German descent, that is not intended as a compliment.
The first pressing comes with a five-song bonus EP, if somehow you escaped Abu Ghraib and need to prolong your fix. I just wish that Touch & Go Records mainman Corey Rusk would see fit to anthologize his own band the Necros rather than devoting time and aluminum-coated discs to Ted's rock(less) crusade.
My only hope is that Ted Leo and the Pharmacists can headline the Al Gore Music Fest.
In Antarctica.
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