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What it came here to do, by the
way, is sing songs. I suppose here is as good a place as any to mention
that every song on this album has vocals, and that the vocals sketch
familiar stories of slight hurts and small triumphs. In a different
universe (perhaps the one Simon
Reynolds imagines
when he thinks of the Junior Boys' place in 2-step history), Last
Exit is a singer-songwriter album: only the trappings of rock and roll, and
its own particular conception of ego, are absent, and so all is changed.
(Let's do note that a different conception of ego is not the same as
there being no concept of ego at all. Good dance music changes hearts
and minds but does not breed new species.) As a singer-songwriter album,
it's almost as bleak as Leonard Cohen's Songs From
a Room: which is to
say, it's lush with human feeling, and stuffed practically to bursting
with subtleties that should take several months to begin properly teasing
out. It's almost all nuance; its punchline lies in the silence after
the record stops playing, and in the new feeling that the silence reveals. |
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LPTJ
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