"It's a terrible love / That I'm walking with spiders," begins the
first line of this album. You can kvetch all you want about this kind of
melodrama, but I don't have to try too hard to imagine Dylan singing
the same words. Besides, like
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,
released six months later, this album is all about the melodrama. The
images here, many of which come straight out of the Old Testament, are
almost apocalyptic: oceans, floods, spiders, zombies, oceans and floods
again, swarms of bees, "Manhattan valleys of the dead." The exaggerated
grandiosity of the like is such that I'm finally convinced that
Berninger has a sense of humor about his problems. The songs here are
also far more universal than anything they've written, except possibly
"Fake Empire." As a grad student, I love "I still owe money to the money
to the money I owe." Most often, it's the simple quips that hit the
hardest: "I don't wanna get over you," "Little voices swallowing my soul
soul soul," lines which don't receive their profundity until
Berninger's repeated them ad infinitum, turning them into whatever the
pomo Brooklynite equivalent of a mantra is, which is probably still
mantra. It's so easy to charge bands with crimes of pomposity, in part
because it's often true. But pomposity done right can be downright
beautiful. This, folks, is pomposity done right.
9/10
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