While You Were Sleeping

I'm not even going to pretend that I know how to write an album review, so I'm not going to. I really, really like the music they play on This American Life. (Take it a step back--I really, really like Ira Glass. Two steps? This American Life. Three steps? PRI. Four steps? You get the picture.) I was listening to an episode (on podcast; I cannot make it anywhere on time, thus the thought that I can listen to a radio show on time is quite amusing) on sleep (too many fucking parenthetical asides....sorry) and one of the interludes played Elvis Perkins' song "While You Were Sleeping." Now, at the time--in the car, sweaty and mildly pissed from a crappy night of tennis--I didn't know it was Elvis Perkins, but I did know that it was a really captivating song.

It's pretty simple, really. Acoustic guitar, brushes on a muted drum set, a stand-up bass, Perkins, and later, some awesome trumpet (maybe coronet?). Really, nothing too special. Even Perkin's voice, a touch haunting and possibly a hint of a western accent(?), sounds like he spent hours in front of the stereo, memorizing Neutral Milk Hotel licks and yowling like a cat until he sounded like Jeff Magnum.

Back to the thesis--the song is really fucking good. You should acquire it.

So I bought the album, Ash Wednesday. Pretty rash of me, but like I said, I was really digging this song. Every review I read was into the album, but more importantly, they were all jazzed about Perkins himself. Son of Hollywood big shot who dies tragically when Elvis is a wee lad; Brown drop out (typical); son of a Hollywood actress who dies tragically in one of the 9/11 planes. He's certainly got a lot of material to work with, but frankly I thought the album was a little lame.

A few months later, I was doing a project on Sylvia Plath for my English class. I out-nerded myself and acquired five books of essays on her work--most of the better essays were written in this century. My feelings about the Post-Structuralists wax and wane, but Susan Van Dyne, a Plath scholar at Smith (beloved Sylvia's alma mater), argues passionately in "The Problem of Biography" that everyone spends way more time on Plath's biography than on her skills as a poet, or even her poetry. It struck me that the same thing happened with Ash Wednesday--every reviewer (with some notable exceptions, found only post-disappointment) spent at least half of the review talking about Perkins' tragic past. And c'mon, after that, how are you supposed to pan a stylistically uninspired album? Or maybe they just stopped at While You Were Sleeping.