Clem Snide

by Ben Sisario

Clem Snide's singer Eef Barzelay has a disarmingly conversational voice, a friendly, nasal Kermit, and his songs are like talks on a long, late-night drive to nowhere. He rambles, occasionally stumbling onto clever metaphors like "I'm feeling like the ice cube in your glass, melting away" and "Tonight I feel like Elvis searching for his long-lost twin," but most of the time he just rambles--beginning almost every sentence with "and"--as the engine rumbles beneath him. Clem Snide, an acoustic New York quartet, has an engine of fine, countryish chamber-pop designed to get you to sit down, listen and light a smoke. Barzelay's songs evoke meditative country from Hank to Lucinda, but without their sense of tragedy. Even at his most cynical, the most bile Barzelay can muster adds up to cute observations like "The beautiful were never meant to suffer" and "Does anybody ever get what they want?"--pub wisdom, or perhaps coffee wisdom, it sounds like it's being delivered with a shrug. Like the cello-bass-violin-and-whatever arrangements of the songs, lots of guests join in on The Ghost of Fashion, the band's third album. The result is generally tasteful arrangements that occasionally go over the edge into carnival, as on "Ice Cube." The songs are smart but just too pretentious, seeming to ponder big, big ideas about life but not really saying much. He should stick to the simplicity and sparseness of the band's last album, Your Favorite Music, which was recently reissued by SpinART and deserves space on the shelf of every talkative loner. B+