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The Short
Happy Life: The Album Is Also Called the Short Happy Life
Yes! This is one of them! Another album that shows up in your mailbox and slaps ya upside the head with originality. Thank you. Lets talk about some Jerry Fels. Jerry Fels is one of those rare, mad, Casio crooner types; either geniusly insane or insanely genius. One thing for sure is that this album is brilliant. He adorned the name The Short Happy Life, wrote some very strange, off-key lyrics about all kinds of relationships (girls, himself, mostly failed) and tricked a keyboard into being his backing band, along with some guitar and hand claps. Now before I dive anymore into this album, I would like to discuss the packaging that this showed up in. Packaging is pretty key in a reviewers life; Im a firm believer of judging a CD or record by its cover. Even from just working in a record store, you grow tired of artwork that just doesnt jump out at you, so you throw the CD in the used bin for anyone else to find. Nobodys Favorite Records brought us this little gem for the collection, a little D.I.Y. label run by Jerry himself I presume; this is catalog number 005. It came in a plastic slip-sleeve pasted shut by a bright red heart sticker. The CD case is a thin cardboard sleeve with a couple of simple photos printed on either side, written over in a quick scrawl listing tracks and copyright info. To my surprise, as I opened the sleeve to slide the CD out, a little temporary heart tattoo with an arrow through it and a forever banner slung across it, dropped out. Yes! You might ask, Chaz, are you going to use this temporary heart tattoo and be one with Jerry? No sir, I will not, Im a collector baby. Moving on, this really is just purely awesome and beautiful weirdness. The singing is out of key, the casio playing is minimal and full of cheesy beats, the guitar is slightly out of tune, and there are handclaps. Butit works. It works so well. The lyrics and subjects of every one of these short songs are great. Only a couple of the tracks are more than two minutes, and they feel like sprawling epics of crazy electro-babble. Its so gorgeously brain-infecting that I just want to keep listening to it. Loving you is a Waste of Time is purely brilliant. He goes off on a tangent about how nice this girls new boyfriend is going to be to her, and it goes on for so long that you forget hes not singing about himself. The directions where his lyrics go are out there, and hes just spinning webs as he moves along. Its a great new step in different music; hes completely deconstructing it and playing with the pieces. In Oh Jerry, hes singing a eulogy to someone who just put a shotgun in his mouth, someone who sounds a whole lot like him. Oh Carrie Brownstein finds Jerry losing his rock because of a girl. Its all sung in that geeky Rivers Cuomo-esque way. Trust me, go find this record, wherever it can be dug up.
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