Review of Baby I'm Bored
From Wiseacre
It usually goes something like
this. Act appears. Act makes a record, maybe two. Act is pigeonholed by media
and public. Act gets a bit pissed off with the pigeonholing. So pissed off,
in fact, that act then makes determined and conspicuous effort to prove act
isn't anything like their pigeonhole. But, in so doing, act ditches all the
things you liked about them in the first place. Oops.
Not Evan Dando, though. Almost as soon as people began to realise who he was,
the longtime Lemonhead with the hippy mane and lugubrious voice was pinned
as the poster boy for slacker rock. Dando's reaction? Not, as you might expect,
to shave off all his hair and make a hip hop album. No: in the late 1990s,
Dando buggered off to Australia, hung around on the beach for a few years
and... well, slacked.
An appearance at the Barbican's Beyond Nashville festival in late 2001 showed
that his hiatus hadn't changed him a bit. Stumbling on stage, his plain songcraft
and winningly vague personality stole the show from the likes of Lambchop,
Sparklehorse and PJ Harvey and had people hoping he'd get around to recording
again. And now, almost 18 months later, he has.
Baby I'm Bored is not, sadly, the much-rumoured 'Evan goes country' set; rather,
this sounds just like The Lemonheads, only a teensy bit slower and a weensy
bit quieter. A few guests add their signature talents -- noted producer Jon
Brion chimes in on a trio of tracks, Giant Sand play on a couple more -- but
this is still a simple record, Dando drawling his way through melodies by
turns appealing and forgettable to a spartan backing.
And like every record in the Dando catalogue, it's frustrating stuff. At his
best -- a cover of Ben Lee's Hard Drive, the cinchy pop of It Looks Like You
-- Dando makes it sound so charmingly, disarmingly easy. At his worst, as
on the fidgety Repeat and the merely dreary Rancho Santa Fe... well, he pretty
much nailed it in the album title. Business as usual, then; once a slacker,
always a slacker. It's always good to have him around. But it could always
be a little better.