The dream is always the same. We keep thinking that music can save our soul, that we can hear that one damn song that makes us break down and cry, that a killer album can be the umbrella on our rainiest day, that one great rock show can change the world, and we keep getting proven wrong–
Well, except that sometimes all these hoary clichés come true. Ted Leo is a firm believer in all that nonsense, and he makes records like Hell will crack open if he doesn’t put his whole heart and soul into every single line of every single song. And with The Brutalist Bricks (Matador), he’s left it all on the court again; this is a work of passion, of intelligence, and of true faith that music can mean something in this effed-up ineffable world.
I’m not sure that younger people will love Ted Leo’s work, not at first, anyway; it’s jam-packed with references to ska and literate 1980s new wave and progressive arena rock and political agit-pop, music that is no longer, how-you-say, fashionable these days. And his voice isn’t that great, although you don’t need a great voice to be a great singer, and Leo is definitely a great singer. There is little R&B in his stuff, although it has a lot of roots in soul music, no hip-hop except some funky beats and occasional talking-blues stylings, and any metal is firmly in the camp of Thin Lizzy. “Who’s Thin Lizzy, Uncle Matt?” See? It’s pretty much in my wheelhouse, but I am an ancient greybeard.
But I can’t really imagine anyone, not even young people who have never heard of Thin Lizzy or the Specials or Squeeze or the Minutemen, not loving the headlong abandon of hot punky goodness like “Mourning in America” or the wide-screen seize-the-day jangle of “Even Heroes Have to Die.” You might not like Leo’s lyrical approach, which careens wildly from specific details to wider pronouncements, but his actual lyrics will stay with you even if you don’t love them at first.
For example, the haunting opening lines of the record from “The Mighty Sparrow”: “When the café doors exploded / I reacted too / reacted to you”; easily dismissable, you think, and then you hear it in your head hours later, Leo wailing out like he has to punch a hole in the sky with his voice, and realize damn, that is a pretty great way to open a record. And the way “Bottled in Cork” starts out like early Elvis Costello and turns into a call-and-response bildungsroman about going to see his sister’s kid in Copenhagen and loneliness, capped by the lovely repeated refrain “Tell the bartender / I think I’m falling love.” Dude gots a lot of arrows in the quiver, is what I’m saying.
But while Ted Leo is one of the most easily likable and coherent singer/songwriters around, it is as a bandleader that he really stands tallest. The Pharmacists are a lot more than just a backup band–they are a well-oiled machine, matching every track’s twists and turns with propulsion and precision. “Woke Up Near Chelsea” is a beast of a rocking track, all stops and starts and power chords; “Gimme the Wire” is a flat-out jam with a chorus that reminds me of Husker Du; they even nail the psychedelic freak-folk of “Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop” without breaking a sweat.
To sum up: yeah, I guess I like this a little. Not because it’s the greatest album I will hear this year, although it’s definitely top 5 or 10 material, but because it keeps alive the dream that we all dream of: that maybe some records CAN, in fact, save your mortal soul. What a charmingly quaint old-fashioned thing to believe–what a relief to find out that it’s not complete bullshit, after all.
