Aimee Mann Releases @#%&*! Smilers
Free way is Lead Single from Mann's Followup to The Forgotten Arm
Aimee Mann's latest album, @#%&*! Smilers, was recorded without any electric guitars. Thanks to a savvy use of keyboards and deft production, the songs hardly suffer.
Over the course of 5 solo albums, a live record and a Christmas collection, Aimee Mann has plumbed rich ground among the depraved and down-and-out. Addicts and underachievers populate her songs in droves. Her 2005 album, The Forgotten Arm, was a concept record that took her penchant for seedy characters to new heights by following the travels and travails of two lovers plagued by drug abuse and co-dependency.
From the first notes of "Freeway," the lead-off track to Mann's excellent new @#%&*! Smilers, it doesn't take long for it to sink in (if it hasn't already) that Mann is a master of marrying the character sketch to a completely hummable melody. Accompanied by drums, bass, a synthesizer and her acoustic guitar, Mann sings, "You've got a lot of money but you can't afford the freeway," in which the main character struggles on a road to Orange County that inevitably leads to drugs, blackmail and heaven knows what else. Not exactly an uplifting topic, yet as always Mann expertly lays her rhymes across a shimmering pop melody that belies her dark lyricism.
Smilers Benefts from Mann's Taut Melodies, Insightful Lyrics
From there Smilers travels a windy yet insistently melodic road. In hardly more than one minute, the plaintive, string-drenched "Stranger into Starman" sees Mann analogizing a relationship to a crossword puzzle. "I turned stranger into starman in the Sunday New York Times," she sings, "like Anne Sexton and her star rats, working backwards til it rhymes."
Meanwhile, "Looking for Nothing" finds Mann at the carnival, propelled by a Rhodes-piano-fueled groove while "Everybody's waiting for their thing just to come along, they all got something they can pin all their feelings on." Even when she's hit bottom, a beautiful piano solo and smart arrangement keep the tune from following her there. "31 Today" mines similar territory, finding the narrator drinking Guinness in some dive on her 31st birthday. "I thought my life would be different somehow," she sings in front of a cadre of organ swells and funky keyboard tones, "I thought my life would be better by now, but it's not and I don't know where to turn."
Paul Bryan's Production Enriches Smilers
In "Columbus Avenue," a waltz-time number that recalls "Nothing is Good Enough" from her 1999 album Bachelor No. 2, Mann speaks to a character who came here to make a name, only to find that it is the end of the line. "The place where you failed to make your story go over," she recalls, "The place where you bailed and let the bottom drag you under."
Mann's pull-no-punches approach to her lyrics would be cumbersome if it were not for her keen sense of melody and the gorgeous, layered production, supplied here by her longtime bassist Paul Bryan. According to her recent interview with Newsweek, Smilers also happens to be the first Aimee Mann album that is 100-percent free of any electric guitar, instead utilizing the massive talents of keyboardist Jamie Edwards to supply an appropriate amount of edge and buoyancy to these songs. By the time "Ballantines"--a bouncy duet with San Francisco singer Sean Hayes--concludes, it's hard not to smile upon multiple helpings of Mann's songs of despair and isolation.
