Love of Everything, Best in Tensions
[Record Label Record Label]
Reviewed By: Chris Polley
Some musicians just make you smile. They don’t burrow deep into your soul and they don’t revolutionize much of anything, but you cannot deny that they have the power to put a grin on your face, if even just temporarily. Love of Everything’s Bobby Burg is one of these people. In fact, the plastered emoticon on my stupid mug was so fleeting that I seemed to have lost track of him in recent years, even though when he performed under his LoE moniker at the college radio station I worked at in college I remember being awestruck and then subsequently voraciously listened to his 2006 album Superior Mold and Die. I mean the man took pictures of his friends (including tourmate-at-the-time electronic madman Cex) singing back-up vox from a couch and looped the sound of the Fisher Price camera flash/click as a percussion beat while he wailed away and made me enamored in more ways than one.
But despite this, plus the fact that he ended up playing bass and guitar in two bands that I have followed religiously since day one (Make Believe & Joan of Arc) I still managed to lose track of him over the past four years. That is, until I got an email from Audiosuede editor-in-chief Christian asking if I was interested in reviewing the new Love of Everything record. So of course, with those old feeling swimming their way back up into my head, I wrote back with many exclamation points and a resounding “yes.” It wasn’t until after I did this that I realized how little I actually remembered about LoE except for the anecdote retold above. But I remember being happy during that timeless moment in the studio, and I remember Burg smiling behind the plexi-glass with his eyes closed as he chirped into the microphone with a plastic camera in one hand and a beat-up electric guitar in the other. It’s true what they say: unadulterated joy can be contagious.
So when I half-eagerly/half-cautiously pressed play on the new collection of songs, adorably and cleverly titled Best in Tensions, the first thing I noticed is that this didn’t just sound like Burg anymore, with some friends helping him out from a comfortable sofa or late-night overdub. It sounded like Love of Everything was a bonafide band with at least one other member that transformed Burg’s lo-fi looping and digital reconstruction pop project into a lo-fi organic jangle-pop outfit. Upon further inspection it turns out that maybe the band’s name isn’t just a generalized proclamation to the world, because as of this record, Burg’s ex-wife Elisse La Roche is responsible for all the beats.
Now I suppose a human is better than a Fisher Price camera, but after taking a listen back to the still excellent Superior Mold and Die, somehow the sound has been thinned on the new record, resembling something more ramshackle and bedroom-oriented than its predecessor, which for all intents and purposes, was exactly that, even though it didn’t sound like it. On the older release, Burg seemed more confident in his ability to spill out so much emotion and childhood glee with his smorgasbord of samples, keyboards, and crackly guitar riffs that anyone else besides the occasional reminder that a friend is a good thing to have might have overflowed the quaint mix that he had perfected on his own.
And even though the opposite of what was expected ended up happening with Best in Tensions, it’s still a double-edged sword. On the one hand it’s refreshing that Burg took a second to look around at what he now culled together for a new version of Love of Everything before he just quickly tried to do the same thing as a duo that he did as a solo project. Truly, this works for him on more than a couple tracks, especially “Fear of Missing Out” and “Marry My Wife”, in which the tandem tumbling drums and shaky guitar perfectly complement each other, rounding out a short but effective ditty that shows the ex-couple’s strengths as a musical pair. On the other hand, about half of the album doesn’t feel fleshed out, which I understand is part of the point of lo-fi music, but in 2006 I felt that was what set Burg apart from the crowd of slackers and disinterested hipsters. Here was a guy who felt and lived and just happened to dig the sounds of broken guitar pedals and old garage sale-acquired equipment. But unfortunately he occasionally falls into the pitfalls of publishing songs that sound undercooked or half-written, such as the lackluster opener “Tin Can Phone” or the potential-wasting harmonica tune “Strip to the Sky”.
If looked at as a whole, however, is the unique smile from four years ago back on my face after a few listens through this record? Undoubtedly the answer is yes. One listen to “Birds, Ice Cream, & Whales” is actually all it takes to remind me of how this man is the master of rekindling feelings from a lost time, when cute animals and sugary foods were all that we thought about and wanted because we didn’t know what to do with those wild emotions that started wriggling around inside of us. In fact, even though I liked Karen O.’s score, I would even venture to say that if Burg were put in charge of soundtracking Where the Wild Things Are, he might have helped circumvent the backlash re: the over-stylized kid-unfriendly feel of Spike Jonze’s tale. His songs, whether they’re slight failures or enormous successes, always remind one of what it’s like to have a simple emotion. Sure it’ll be gone when you have to wake up at 7 a.m. and commute to work for the umpteenth time, but you can come back to it whenever you want. You just have to remind yourself.
Rating: 73%