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October 28, 2004
New Wave OR the Soft Pink Truth: the law of excluded middle
the Soft Pink Truth - Kitchen (L. Voag)
This song is a toddler you agreed to babysit, named Jason, who is standing in the middle of a white lineoleum floor. He's wearing a Barney costume, and he's brandishing an egg-beater like a West Side Story Jet (if the movie took place entirely within the confines of a Willams-Sonoma outlet). Somehow the little son of a buck managed to get into his Mom's make-up box and smear lisptick all over his face, so he's got this weird Sunset Boulevard/Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? vibe going on. You're getting paid $14 for six hours of supervision. Enought money to buy, what- a box of Hot-Pockets and maybe a can of air-freshener? This little boy is the word 'petulant' made flesh, the Brat Christ, etcetcetera. Now, can you change his diaper, de-freakify his face, and get him to zonk out in front of 'Blues Clues' before his semi-attractive mother returns home? Can you do all that without him biting your nose like a Gila monster? I think we both know the answer to that.
Actually, this song is only like the first half of that paragraph. As I mentioned the other day, 'Kitchen' is composed of one part sass, two parts zing. That's real chemistry, my friends, pure science. Drew Daniel himself(!!) handles the vocal duties on this piece, and he does an amazing job. He whines, he mutters, he sighs, he demands. So many of the background percussive noises in this track sound like something a little kid would do: clicking his tongue up against the roof of his mouth, blowing raspberries, beatboxing...you know. Add that to the super-patent kitchen utensil field-recordings (tea kettle, pots and pans), and this becomes something like what the bespectacled gamin from Jerry McGuire (the human head weighs 8lbs. boy) would produce, if he was given expensive synthesizers and sequencers, taught to use ProTools, and was an unqualified musical genius. The proximity-echo handclaps at the end of 'Kitchen' are what pushes it over the top from 'outstanding' to 'fucking priceless'. This album, 'Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth', is unstoppable, beginning to end (including the Carol Channing snippet of the last track), and absolutely worth your money. You can buy it HERE. 'Kitchen' was written and originally recorded by L. Voag, of the Homosexuals, and (I think) released on his solo album 'The Way Out', which you can purchase for only 2 dollars (less than one hundred), right HERE. (Whoa- Soft Pink Truth now has its own snug little webpage, with excellent background color choice. Check it out.)
Posted by matt at October 28, 2004 08:00 AM