This Week's Special Guest Stars
Let's get this out of the way early: Elvis Costello's 'guest vocal' turn on "Carpetbaggers" —mid Jenny Lewis solo-album— is one of 2008's worst musical moments. Forget for a second that he authored This Year's Model in 1978; here Costello belts out a wonky verse worthy of a drunken uncle crashing the karaoke mic; the salty old rock-dog coughing each syllable out with a a painful, over-annunciating desperation.
This one verse isn't enough to spoil the whole of Acid Tongue, but, critically, you can't just gloss over it. If only for the simple fact that Lewis's second solo disc is all about its guests; the songstress herself hoping it captures a period of time in which her and various Los Angelino friends were 'hanging out.' A former child-actor who's long dwelled in LA, the sometime Rilo Kiley leader just happens to have famous friends: Costello, Chris Robinson, Benji Hughes, Zooey Deschanel, M. Ward, and beau Johnathan Rice amongst the helping-hands helping out here. It's a guest-list built to impress, but, in Costello's case, the name doesn't always match the game.
Acid Tongue uses its many helpers, and some slick, slide-guitar-totin’ production, to, essentially, emptily approximate a ‘classic,’ Laurel Canyon-esque country-rock album. Where her first disc, Rabbit Fur Coat, laced sweetly alt-country with lacerating lyrics, Acid Tongue merely makes big, bold recreations of old soul ballads and blues-rock belters, and expects that excess to rustle up meaning; as if the aping of archetypes, the conforming to standards, will give her own album classic, timeless qualities.
What a Girl Wants
Acid Tongue is, at essence, a classic case of second-album ambition. Unfortunately, the set plays like a succession of in-jokes; Lewis and pals trying on the vintage threads of various parents-record-collection modes and laughing, like they're in the middle of some teen-film popping-out-of-the-wardrobe montage.
"Next Messiah" is a nine-minute triptych inspired by Barbra Streisand medleys, grafting a narrative onto boogie-rock licks. "Bad Man’s World" and "Trying My Best to Love You," in all their sweeping strings and block piano chords, are a pair of soul-styled numbers so self-conscious in their attempt to past modes of soulfulness that they remind me of that chart-bothered charlatan recidivist Alicia Keys, wielding homage in place of actual artistry.
The disc's luminous closing number, "Sing A Song For Them," is easily its standout moment; but, even still, listening to the lyrical roll-call of the city's down-and-outers seems like an exercise in social insincerity; as if her shout-outs to "the ex-thrill seekers in the methadone lines" as a satire of faux-socially-conscious soul.
Maybe Lewis isn't joking; either lyrically or, across the set, musically. But there's definitely a sense of irreverence, a kind of self-congratulatory humor as Lewis and pals kick of the jams of genre, embracing the restrictions of playing variations on standards. And all this smirking certainly gives off a sense of disingenuousness: Acid Tongue an album that sounds as it’s delivered entirely inside of self-conscious quotation marks.
Record Label: Warner
Release Date: 23 September 2008
