I was a bit nervous about squeezing in two reviews this week with a late start after a long weekend. Fortunately, fate intervened with that shortest of listens…an EP. More on this later.
Disc 1926 is…A Beautiful EP
Artist: Clem Snide
Year of Release: 2003
What’s up with the Cover? A woman lifts her skirt in a playful but modest manner. Perhaps she’s dancing, or maybe just showing off her fancy shoes in anticipation of dancing.
How I Came To Know It: I have been a fan of Clem Snide since 2020 when they released “Forever Just Beyond”, but to my chagrin realized they’d already been around twenty years before I ever “discovered” them.
Even worse, a lot of their early albums which I now covet are very hard to find, and as a result I have lurked the “miscellaneous C” section of local record stores for years hoping for a score.
I’ve managed to land two more through this hunt and peck strategy (1999’s “Your Favourite Music” and 2009’s “Hungry Bird”) but five more LPs still elude me.
So when I saw this EP there I decided to buy it even though it wasn’t on my wish-list, all the while hoping it would overcome the EP curse.
How It Stacks Up: I have three Clem Snide albums, but this is an EP and therefore a different animal. As it is my only EP by the band, it cannot stack up.
Ratings: 2 stars
Not long after I got through my second of many listens of “A Beautiful EP” I realized two things. First, that it is objectively a solid record by a band I enjoy. Second, that much of what constitutes an EP tends to annoy me.
EPs can be great, but they are often dodgy by their very nature. They usually have half or fewer the number of songs from an LP, but they’re rarely half the price. Those songs tend to take a few well-worn turns best left unexplored, and “A Beautiful EP” is no exception.
First off, EPs love their cover songs. Sometimes you can get some real gems in the process – things the band might not put on a full record because it doesn’t suit the vibe or theme, but can work on an EP. Ghost covering the Eurythmics “Missionary Man” or Soundgarden doing the Ohio Players’ “Fopp” are two great examples. Bonus points if the band later combines a couple EPs into an album you can buy as a full length (as Soundgarden did this on “Screaming Life/Fopp”).
Clem Snide goes for a cover of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” which is…solid. It isn’t as good as the Ghost and Soundgarden songs I noted above, but I don’t like the original as much, so it had less to work with. Anyway, I liked it, and Clem Snide indie pop it up with solid success. Lead singer Eef Barzelay can’t hold a candle to Aguilera’s vocal gymnastics, but he doesn’t go for that, sticking to a punk adjacent approach that lacks depth, but retains enough edge to see it through.
The band also does a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” which is, again, passable but not a “must have” by any stretch. I prefer the original, as the cover drags just a bit.
EPs also like to recycle old songs with very similar new versions. Again, “A Beautiful EP” has two of these. “Nick Drake Tape” from their 1998 debut and “All Green” from “Soft Spot” (released earlier the same year). Argh. Both songs are OK, but knowing they’re recycled from earlier records is irritating. Despite it being many years later, I felt the echo of irritation of hard core fans having to buy these songs twice just to get the two covers.
This leaves us with only a single song that is 100% new and original material – “Mike Kalinsky” at Track 3. This song, about a high school outcast who doesn’t “do sports”, or score with girls but later goes on to be a successful musician is fine as narrative arcs go. However, the switch in styles from the slow folk pop of the main tune into a – surprise! – jump to Kalinsky’s punk rock styling at the end wore thin after multiple listens (which with an 18-minute EP you are going to get plenty of).
For all this, there aren’t any terrible songs on the record, and absent Aguilera’s powerhouse vocals I realized that “Beautiful” is a much stronger song structurally than I had ever given it credit for as a pop ballad. “All Green” is a lovely pastoral tune that makes you think of lazy summer days and iced tea.
But at the end of the day, I don’t need a bunch of re-releases, live versions and covers. If I wanted that experience, I’d buy a boxed set. So I’m going to part company with this record and do what I should have done in the first place: wait for the LPs that are actually on my list to show up in the record store and buy those instead.
Best tracks: Beautiful, All Green
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