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Tim Borkowski as he appears in the neatly packaged booklet for the brilliantly titled and all-around great CD Songs You Won't Like on an Album You Don't Want. (May 7, 2012) |
Borkowski, Songs You Won’t Like on an Album You Don’t Want (15-song CD, a “No Label First Edition available from CD Baby and other online independent retailers).
Borkowski’s Songs You Won’t Like on an Album You Don’t Want tries so hard not to be liked that it’s irresistible. It is the savage breast that hath charms.
The opening number, “Everybody Wants to Commit Suicide,” is a miasma of tribal beats and bubblegum, with coolly delivered shock-lyrics such as “Everybody wants blistering STDs/Everybody wants greenhouse effect degrees.” It’s cruelly catchy, not something you’d want to be caught singing out loud in public.
The hits just keep on coming: the self-aggrandizing “Human Against Pregnancy,” the plea to “reasonable people” that “Your God Sucks… Sucks so much… Yes, he does… Sucks so much…”) “Sex Fight” (“Let’s jump up and down on our hearts with a pogo stick”), “War on Animals,” “The Universe is Annoying.” The album’s liner notes includes a bonus essay on “Whales, Squirrels and Suicides” which furthers the provocation, and the amusement.
One simply hopes, for the sake of the world, that all this bitterness is ironic. It’s certainly consistent, in a wondrous, tempered manner. The whole album is recorded in an appealing style reminiscent of ‘90s commercialized indie rock—the shouted raspy whispers, the wobbly upfront guitars, the deliberate second-generation-Sister-Ray fuzz and feedback of “Satan’s College of Nude Girls,” the spaghetti-western sonic sensibility of “Panoply of Rainclouds,” the neoclassical languor of “Rise of the Agnostics” (which quickly descends into Faustian thump/buzz percussion and winsome yowls).
There’s a persistent echo in the mix, reminiscent of bandleader (and band in general) Tim Borkowski’s old group Groovski. But Groovski was ALL echo. This is layered, textured, chemically unstable and volatile stuff, complex in nature but disarmingly direct. The lyrics of these songs are as good as the titles, and the care taken with the musical shifts and depths take the whole project to a higher plane. This is an album that rewards several different states of mind, and it deserves to be bought and downloaded on numerous devices so that it can be explored as widely as possible.
Songs You Won’t Like on an Album You Don’t Want belies its brilliant title. This stuff is intoxicating and easy to swallow, with the slight caveat that it’s made out of shards of glass.
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