Album review: Barenaked Ladies’ “Silverball”
Lead vocalist and ironically fully-clothed man Ed Robertson claims that “Silverball” doesn’t sound like anything they’ve done before, yet sounds “unmistakably” like Barenaked Ladies. Arguably, Barenaked Ladies don’t really have a sound—Ed Robertson does. His singing has nearly the same precise nonregional dialect as Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard.
Here’s what Barenaked Ladies do sound like: silly, lighthearted, squeaky-clean, ready-for-Disney, and anything but serious or remotely “artistic.” (It’s tempting to punctuate “artistic” with some fatalistic jab, like “whatever that even means in 2015,” but music historians will look at the wealth of music currently being drowned by mainstream sewage and wonder how the public of 2015 was able to miss it.) So yeah, it’s the new Barenaked Ladies record. Woo-hoo.
No one can say that it sucks unless they just plain don’t like Barenaked Ladies—in which case, yeah, it kind of sucks. These dudes have built an empire upon their signature dorky, quirky pop. For sure, they’ve written some very clever songs, like “One Week,” “Pinch Me,” “If I Had a Million Dollars,” “It’s All Been Done,” or the peppy yet poignant “The Old Apartment.” One really could teach an entire songwriting course solely using Barenaked Ladies tunes as examples.
So they write great songs. Or, at least, they used to. But what they fail to do well is emote. They’re like They Might Be Giants, Jr. They’re like a musical photo negative of Smashing Pumpkins. It’s difficult to imagine them delivering anything that you wouldn’t listen to while running around the house and spraying silly string everywhere. Like some band comprised of devils, they are masters of their domain but seem to be unable to escape, trapped within their kingdom for eternity.
“Get Back Up” opens surprisingly “heavily,” like Aerosmith Lite. It’s transparently about the band itself, who have been struggling to reclaim or reforge their identity since the loss of Steven Page in 2009. Similarly, “Here Before” features not only the same retrospective navel-gazing as the opening track but also the same kind of foot-stomping employed by Queen in “We Will Rock You,” although, unfortunately, BNL aren’t going to rock you nearly as hard as Queen did. They are going to rock you like a Nerf bat.
“Matter of Time” opens with a tease: you’ll notice that two-note melody tugging at a musical memory. That’s Spacehog’s “In The Meantime” you’re hearing in your head. It’s pretty risky evoking a song that kicks so much ass in a song that kicks so little.
With another sort-of-exciting intro, “Duct Tape Heart” is a bland imitation of BNL’s own past repertoire. This band’s catalog is full of songs that take a gimmick and milk it so hard that it actually works, and there are few other bands who have been able to pull that off as well as BNL. But “Duct Tape Heart” just doesn’t deliver, sounding instead as half-hearted as the lyrics suggest.
Entering dangerous territory, “Say What You Will” is a self-deprecating love song in the vein of The Rembrandts. If only it actually went somewhere. But it’s pretty monotone, as if they cranked all the amps up to “four” and broke off the knobs.
“Passcode” is another love song, but it actually employs both a little variety as well as a few tricks from the old BNL playbook. There are asymmetrical phrase lengths, some interesting vocal harmonies, and a little genuine energy. However, it’s still pretty MIDI-heavy—safe and sparkly clean, as usual. It takes no chances at all.
At least “Hold My Hand” has some genuine guitar work. It’s nothing that will put them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but at least there’s something that an audio engineer didn’t quantize or filter through autotune. Lyrically, there’s not much going on, but it’s nice to hear someone bend a guitar string like he has something to say.
They manage to maintain that sincerity in “Narrow Streets,” and “Toe to Toe” thankfully goes even further in that direction. For the first time on this album, Robertson really sings—comparatively, at least, by the standards set thus far. Instrumentally, it’s scaled back quite a bit, with a finger-picked acoustic guitar, piano, light drums, and a distant pedal steel. They sure ain’t Union Station, and the production is still uber-clean, but they finally deliver something with some musical substance as well as just enough poignancy, lyrically. The only let down is that, about three minutes in, you can just feel the bridge coming on—and then it just doesn’t. That’s the end. They had the ball, and they fumbled it. It’s like watching a woman take off her jacket, then her sweater, and then—nope, that’s it.
Sadly, they follow that with “Piece of Cake,” which tries to have some attitude. It tries to do something vaguely disco, kind of. It tries to let its hair down but realizes that it’s middle-aged and balding. It’s certainly a piece of something. This is probably going to be the big, teary-eyed moment for them onstage, but it’s more like something U2 accidentally farted out in its sleep than a real fist-pumper.
“Globetrot” is just terrible. Said one Utahn passerby: “What’s that?” Remarked one reviewer: “It’s the new Barenaked Ladies album.” Quipped said passerby: “It’s terrible.” Get it?
Remember how Radiohead’s second album, “The Bends,” starts out? Remember that distorted, airy, white noise that descends into the intro to “Planet Telex”? Hell yeah you do. Welp, BNL makes the same mistake they did with “Matter of Time.” Once the initial disappointment that this song is nowhere in the vicinity of “Planet Telex” passes, the title track turns out to be unremarkable but not bad. The album itself is named after Robertson’s obsession with pinball (he apparently has amassed a number of machines). The song, “Silverball,” speaks metaphorically, although neither particularly gracefully nor profoundly, about a relationship: “Light me up / knock me down / I’m free game whenever you’re around.” It probably would have been cuter 20 years ago.
“Tired of Fighting With You” returns to the sentimental realm of “Toe to Toe.” However, the soft and hazy feel is reminiscent of something between Phil Collins at his cheesiest and a Weird Al Yankovic ballad (like “You Don’t Love Me Anymore”). Couple this with utterly disastrous lyrics, like “I’m tired of fighting with you / I’m tired of fighting with you / I’m so tired of fighting with you,” and you realize that you’re so tired of listening to this album.
“Silverball” is kind of a disappointment, sort of like the Titanic and the Hindenburg were kind of disappointments. These dudes have simply lost the energy of the ‘90s. It’s clear as day. That’s not something to condemn them too harshly for; no one can stay at their peak indefinitely. Nudity and gender aside, they’ve sold over 14 million albums and won seven Juno awards. But if these one-trick wonders can no longer pull off the one trick they had up their sleeve…who cares?
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