Clem Snide, End of Love (4 x 4 review)

Artist: Clem Snide
Title: End of Love
Label: spinART (2005)
Genre: (Alt-)Country (by the skin of its teeth)
Rotation: Heavy

Clem Snide bandleader Eef Barzelay wrote this album while moving from New York to Tennessee, which perhaps explains the band’s return to a more country approach than was featured on their last EP. Some of the rest of the small fleet of Clem Snide players (who include Paul Burch and Tony Crow from Lambchop on this outing) still live in New York, and the album was produced part by Lambchop producer Mark Nevers and part by Pavement / Ramones producer Bryce Goggin, so this is the kind of alt-country record that should appeal to people who like, say, Elliott Smith and Daniel Johnston more than they like “Country Music.”

The pairing of feedback and banjo on “Collapse” (2) is quite nice. The little girl voice on “Made For TV Movie” (9) is cuter than I like to admit. “Weird” (11) is a fun barroom hootenanny: “You’re not as weird as you’d like me to think.”

Barzelay himself is a fine songwriter, managing most of the time to be pretty clever without being annoying, and playing simultaneously with earnestness and incisive wit, cutting electric effects and wholesome acoustic guitar. He says this of End of Love: “I like to imagine this record playing in the background as a red state and a blue state—maybe Tennessee and New York—secretly meet at a Comfort Inn off I-40 and have angry, awkward sex.” All righty then.

All clean. Recommended Tracks: 10 (violin), 6 (banjo!), 11, 5, 4, 8 (horns and banjo)