Review
by Tris McCall
JACK'S MANNEQUIN - The Glass Passenger (Sire/WEA)
This year’s Spiritualized record was billed
as a departure: a harrowing chronicle of Jason
Pierce’s emergency hospitalization. Honestly,
though, Pierce has always sounded like he’s
got one butt-cheek on the gurney. The tracks
on
Songs In A&E are strained, cracked,
and desperate, but you could say the same about
every other recording he’s made since
he left the Spacemen 3.
Andrew McMahon of Jack’s Mannequin, by
contrast, began his public ministry as a sunny
and sardonic Californian: He sang bratty piano-punk
about annoying classmates and punk rock princesses
and waking up in the back of a car. His plans
for world domination were temporarily derailed
by lymphoblastic leukemia; three years and a
stem cell transplant later, he’s out of
the hospital, cured, and predictably sober-sided.
The Glass Passenger isn’t the
first album of his to be released since his
diagnosis, but it is the first to squarely engage
physical illness and the alienation and despair
that comes with it.
That said, this is the perspective of a critically
ill patient who expects to live – and
that nail-bitten optimism informs all of McMahon’s
writing. For instance, the kickoff track isn’t
about hospitalization,
per se, it’s
about whether all of his old fans will still
care about him when he’s back on his feet.
“Swim” is a moralizing – but
oh-so-powerful – call to arms against
disease; it might strike you as a convenient
position for McMahon to take now that he’s
cured, but I’d wager more than a few sick
kids have been moved by its plainspoken statement
of resolve. On the lovely “Hammer And
Strings”, he’s reaching out again,
sending one out to a sick girlfriend who explains,
in one of the album’s most gripping stanzas,
that she lacks the strength to kick back at
a society that wants to keep her medicated.
Even the eight-minute O.R. epic that closes
the album mixes medicated pain with the pure
pleasure of existence. “We’re not
gonna lie, son, you just might die”, the
doctors tell him, but when they turn out the
light and he’s left alone with the I.V.
needles in his hip, he remains triumphantly
his own.
Andrew McMahon truly enjoys being Andrew McMahon,
and his passionate self-love animates these
tracks; hell, it probably kept the goofbag alive.
Thrillingly, he bucks ugly 21st-C tradition
by refusing to blame himself for his sickness
– though the more I listen to
The
Glass Passenger, the more I catch the subtle
implications linking physical illness with government
misbehavior. On “Drop Out – The
So Unknown”, the best track on an album
of very good tracks, he’s in a very different
bunker than the one those pessimistic Europeans
in Prinzhorn Dance Studio occupied: he’s
dizzy with sickness but surrounded by friends,
“hiding out until the empire falls”,
and pulling hard for the collapse.
Co-producer Jim Wirt knows a thing or two about
the grandeur of resistance, and, for that matter,
about recording a piano in a rock context: he
was behind the boards for
Do You Feel, The
Rocket Summer’s absurdly-righteous and
soon-to-be-classic LP. McMahon is a fine tunesmith,
but he isn’t the songwriter Bryce Avary
is; a few of the scoring drives here get bogged
down well short of the goal line. “Suicide
Blonde”, in particular, suits the album
concept but adds few musical thrills, and the
chorus of “American Love”, while
fist-pumping enough for Night Ranger, is uncharacteristically
boneheaded.
His playing, however, is consistently excellent;
fluid, dramatic, and courageous (I particularly
dig his prog-rock widdly-widdly synth part on
“Bloodshot”). During his days with
Something Corporate, McMahon had a tendency
to hammer away at the same handful of acrobatic
phrases; that was punk rock, I guess, and etudes
wouldn’t have sat well with the Warped
Tour crowd. With Jack’s Mannequin, he
uses the entire eighty-eight like Billy Joel,
or Tori Amos, or Liberace. By the second half
of the disc, the piano takes over, and he treats
us to the most baroque and expressive performances
in the history of his subgenre; the one-two
punch of “Drop Out – The So Unknown”
and “Hammers And Strings” is straight-up
dazzling.
Emo-pop didn’t really need its own Bruce
Hornsby, but as a big fan of both Hornsby and
emo-pop, I couldn’t be happier at the
alchemy achieved here. That said, his band isn’t
exactly The Range: on
The Glass Passenger,
he’s saddled with a bass player who fills
at the most inopportune moments, and nearly
wrecks the otherwise terrific “What Gets
You Off”. But McMahon’s sense of
purpose is too powerful to be driven astray
by a busy bass or a derivative melody –
he is singing to shake the walls of the sick
bay, and his reedy voice is ingratiating enough
to wiggle its way into harder hearts than mine.
It’s wrong to call
The Glass Passenger
the album that
Songs In A&E should
have been, because Jason Pierce’s insular
vision could never accommodate something as
broadly prescriptive as “Swim”.
But that’s just to say that should I ever
get sick, I’d rather turn to McMahon’s
music for support and understanding. A good
bedside manner needs to risk corniness; that’s
the nature of healthy inspiration, and maybe
even the secret of recovery.
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