:: Track Listing

1. Fourth World War
2. The Sons of Cain
[stream]
3. Army Bound [MP3]
4. Who Do You Love?
5. Colleen
6. A Bottle of Buckie
7. Bomb.Repeat.Bomb [stream]
8. La Costa Brava
9. Annunciation Day/Born
on Christmas Day
10. The Unwanted Things
11. The Lost Brigade
12. The World Stops
Turning
13. Some Beginner’s Mind [MP3]
14. The Toro and the Toreador
15. C.I.A.

:: Record Review

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists

Living With the Living
(Touch & Go; 2007)

Rating: 60%
Combined Rating: 59%


Ted Leo’s had some cumbersome mythologies imposed on him for most of his post-Chisel career: tour van dwelling genre warrior, vegan martyr of the war between indie and major labels, classic rock connoisseur, throwback to seventies punk pinups; Thin Lizzy, but with the weight of world event behind his metaphors. Five albums into said career, it’s as if it couldn’t matter less what kind of effort he puts forth -- “Ballad of the Sin Eater” will continue to be the course text to Ted Leo 101. His is exuberant punk rock from which we demand a statement, from which we forcibly broaden horizons and draw conclusions, even if, as was the case with Living With the Living’s direct precedent Shake the Sheets (2004), sometimes all Ted wants to say is “it’s alright.”

I’ve imposed my own romantic story arc, and it goes something like this: an old band of mine opened for the Pharmacists at a tiny Ottawa bar named Bumper’s for a crowd of maybe six. Ted took the stage by himself and played “Timorous Me,” his band appearing to break in during its clap-along bridge, and they proceeded to blow the doors off the near-empty space. Before Bumper’s (predictably) closed, Leo returned twice more to play there, something even Ottawa bands rarely resorted to. Each visit saw larger crowds trying to sandwich themselves between Bumper’s greasy walls until, during Ted’s final visit, fans spilled out into the streets, peeking desperately over each other’s shoulders for a glimpse through the front window. When speaking to Ted after one of his Montreal shows, I mentioned Ottawa, and he immediately asked, “How’s Bumper’s?”

And so I created my personal notion of Ted Leo, musician for the snot-nosed suburbanite ‘tween. The apex of my own Ted Leo arc was supposed to be his performance at Pitchfork’s second annual festival, in front of thousands of like-minded romantics, what I hoped with self-satisfaction would be evidence of what I’d seen years earlier in Bumper’s. But during his Pitchfork performance, Ted announced that he’d “lost faith” in what he was doing (shortly before ramming a microphone into his head repeatedly, causing blood to stream down his face), to my ears sacrilege from such a principled mouth. This is the man, after all, who once trusted his hard-earned Chisel audience to give his incoherent mash of tape loop snippets, Tej Leo (?), RX/Pharmacists (1999), a fair shake, who embodied accessibility and affability even when his work buried its flashes of periodic melody deep in infuriating confines.

What constitutes this loss of faith, which rudely ran cracks through my Ted Leo myth figure? He’d already put out Shake the Sheets, his most calculatedly commercial (sounding) record and by his own admission a product of wanting to comfort and pat on the back rather than muck rack and despair.

Living With the Living is Ted Leo’s most overtly political album since that venerable and oft-referenced “Ballad of the Sin Eater” and its host album Hearts of Oak (2003). Even after seeing my own Ted Leo arc crumble, there’s still a tendency to suspect he was born figuratively, as well as literally, on September 11th. We return to the caricature, the genre warrior, hoping this time he’ll cleave through the muddle of a war; on “Bomb.Repeat.Bomb,” purportedly influenced by the US bombing of Guatemala during the '50s, Ted staccatos and spits, noisily and messily presuming to adorn his political hat. This is even while he said to Billboard that “[Shake the Sheets] was actually criticized in some corners for not giving people the explicit, screamy statements they wanted at that time. I think sometimes people do actually expect it a little too much."

Which leaves us not knowing exactly what to do with “Bomb.Repeat.Bomb,” or Ted Leo’s apparent renewal of faith. His politics are contentious and problematic, but Ted Leo remains one of the few well-known artists out there willing to be political, whatever his misgivings about people’s expectations, and that’s admirable. I’ve spent much time in recent months maligning the absence of an intentionally political record, one like Living With the Living. Though it never explicitly rails away or gets too comfortable with being protest material for consumers, it’s hard not to read contextually “Army Bound” or the refrain “only you know what you’ve done” from “C.I.A.”

So, on first impression, Living paradoxically surrenders to expectations of defiance. But despite all of its necessarily messy politics, “The Unwanted Things” remains one of the album’s more polarizing moments by virtue of whether or not you think Ted Leo doing dub seems like a good idea. The song is simple and likable enough, but it also feels self-indulgent and can’t help but seem aimless next to the stomp and twang of “Sons of Cain,” the blooming verses of “Army Bound,” and the warm acoustics of “Colleen.” It and other moments like “A Bottle of Buckie” (where Chris Wilson’s ever-improving drums keep it from complete cheese) reveal Living’s personal underside, if lacking penchant for literate genre tribute. The Kinks sound-alike “Who Do You Love” and New Wave homage “La Costa Brava” come closest to my nostalgia-fueled request for love songs, but, like “The Unwanted Things,” they’re rote musical ideas that match only the earnestness of Ted Leo’s lyrics and not their context. Elsewhere, the “Annunciation Day/Born on Christmas Day” duo would initially seem like a slapdash addendum of incomplete ideas if it were not fortunately short and cathartic in its sudden and momentous “Christmas Day” outburst of escaping guitar solos.

Living often takes in too big a breath and so breaths out noise and commotion. As an album it’s alive, chaotic, and electric -- but unfocused. Like Shake the Sheets, with its oddly sequenced top-heavy track list, or Tyranny of Distance (2001) with its tinny production, Living sometimes feels like an album carried just shy of the end zone, the prevalent failing here in its songs’ overly repetitive, two-chord structures. Very open about its influences, “The Lost Brigade” is one of the album’s more rewarding songs, yet while it shows complexity in its arrangements and mellifluous outro, the song’s opening throes also represent Living’s few moments when it seems at odds with its own production values; the wash of a clumsy effect is yet another imposition keeping Ted Leo from a clean, economical pop-punk album.

Living is a long album for Ted Leo and his Pharmacists: fifteen songs, three of which cycle oddly for over six minutes. The band is not one for mantras or gradual, nuanced builds, as the stagnant “it’s alright” chant from Shake the Sheets’ “Little Dawn” already attested. There are moments of brilliance, like first single “Sons of Cain,” when the polyphony of Ted Leo figures converge behind a straightforward formula of character rock, but ultimately none of them are reconciled with one another. Ted Leo again falls a few hands short of the definitive statement we insist on expecting. The tenuous balance between Ted Leo the political prophet and Ted Leo the music geek is, in itself, the most harmful mythology of all: the two are uncomfortable bedfellows, each keeping the other from establishing and maintaining a dominant songwriting voice. Conrad Amenta :: 23 March 2007 |