Jay Bennett – The Magnificent Defeat
You know when little kids burst into a roomful of adults and their enthusiasm trumps their command of language? Unable to organize their thoughts, they just babble everything that comes into their minds. Jay Bennett’s new album, The Magnificent Defeat, is a bit like that. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
If the thirteen songs (plus a hidden track) lack cohesion, there’s admirable daring and imagination bursting from the seams. The former Wilco guitarist has made sure it’s all here: baroque pop melodies, trippy flanged vocals, ever-morphing beats, a kazoo, false starts, studio chatter, stuttering endings — and that’s just a portion of the arsenal employed on the opening cut, “Slow Beautiful Seconds Faster”. Bennett has taken an anything-goes approach to bold, sometimes absurd lengths.
Yet amid the studio clutter lurks some keen songcraft. The tall stacks of beats and layered vocals on “Overexcusers” can’t hide the bilious sentiment at its core. “Thank You” and “I’m Feeling Fine” distinguish themselves at least partly because they whittle the immoderation. Coincidentally, those songs also employ Bennett’s restrained croon, a much more effective instrument than the yelp he uses on “Replace You”, “Phone Book” and “Wide Open”.
For anyone disheartened at the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach taken by many artists, Bennett’s drive to dense-pack his record with ideas will be a balm.