Bitter Honey

Eef Barzelay:
Bitter Honey

[SpinArt; 2006]
Rating: 7.2
"That was my ass you saw bouncin' next to Ludacris." So Eef Barzelay begins his first solo album, Bitter Honey. But before you get visions of the bespectacled indie folkster shaking his rump at the camera, the Clem Snide frontman makes it clear that he's in character. He's speaking for an anonymous video extra, a faceless woman reduced to a bobbing buttocks captured in close-up. It's potentially problematic, a white man speaking for a black woman, and the first verse is a caricature, with Barzelay singing, "All those hoochie skanks ain't gotten shit on me/ And one of Nelly's bodyguards he totally agreed." Barzelay, however, uses that distance between singer and subject-- between male and female, black and white, indie folk and mainstream hip-hop-- to generate a poignant sort of empathy. It's not long before he's fleshing out the cartoon, tracing her life from working-class childhood to her attempt at nursing school: "but all those broken bodies they really got to me." It's her fear of death that drives her to flaunt her body, and Barzelay presents her as sympathetic and contradictory, naïve in her world-weariness: "Don't hate me 'cause I know just what this world is all about."

Once the song ends, Barzelay leaves the hip-hop world behind for the quotidian quarrels and never-speak-aloud daydreams that plague long-term relationships. On "N.M.A. (Nothing Means Anything)" an innocent question-- "What was that actress's name?"-- prompts an argument that's pathetic for being so banal: "I watched as you picked at your food and so perfectly darkened the mood." That mood is indeed dark, especially on "Words That Escape Me". Barzelay imagines his lover's death in a car accident, "just to see how I would look by the ambulance light with a grief-stricken face and the thought that we've never been closer." The spare acoustic setting only makes the sentiment more self-consciously self-absorbed.

Not everything on Bitter Honey is so grim, fortunately. "Thanksgiving Waves" churns a great bit of intensity despite being just Barzelay and his guitar, as he imagines traveling again once this war is over. The short "Little Red Dot" sounds crisp like early springtime, and not just because of the ambient birdsong. And the closer, a nearly a cappella version of "Joy to the World", in this context sounds like a sweet sexual metaphor between a masculine king and a feminine Earth. Wisely, Barzelay downplays the easy pun in the line "the Lord is come" for the weightier and orgasmic physical response: "Fields and floods, rocks hills and plains repeat the sounding joy!"

When they settle down domestically, many rock artists seem to lose some of their spark, their hard-won happiness diluting the angst that made them so compelling in the first place. But on Bitter Honey, Barzelay thrives on the secret fears that lie beneath the surface of even the most secure relationships, torn by unwanted thoughts of personal freedom and suspicions that warmth and happiness are ultimately hollow and meaningless. "Love's the most tender illusion," he sings on "Let Us Be Naked", sounding resigned never to know if that's a good or a bad thing, a beautiful lie or a foolish dupe. That insoluble dilemma makes this modest album surprisingly substantial.

"
- Stephen M. Deusner, March 20, 2006