After an opening line like “That was my ass you saw bouncing next to Ludacris,” where do you go? If you’re Clem Snide frontman Eef Barzelay, you know the way through an audacious character sketch; you’ve been doing it for years. On “Ballad Of Bitter Honey”, Barzelay takes up the voice of a working-class black woman who never finishes nursing school and winds up an entourage dancer in hip-hop videos; she knows deep down that the macho men are just frightened little kids, and she can have anything she wants if she arches her back just so. “Don’t hate me ’cause I know just what this world is all about,” she, or rather, he wails.
Better than any voice-and-guitar demos have any right to be, Bitter Honey sounds as good as post-boombox Mountain Goats, and the best songs equal the magically quotidian lyricism of John Darnielle or John Vanderslice. Point of view remains Barzelay’s secret weapon; he mostly leaves narrators ambiguous, situations suggestive.
On “Thanksgiving Waves”, he dreams of the pleasures possible once this endless war ends, then hints that it may be President Bush doing the dreaming. The acoustic thrust of “Well” charges the self-implicating Dylan dress-down of “Truthfulness will leave the room if I ever wish you well,” and the morbid but somehow sweet confession of “Words Escape Me” gets by on a few pretty country-picked chords.
On skewed love songs “N.M.A.” (translation: “Nothing Means Anything”) and “I Wasn’t Really Drunk” (“I was just pretending”), the absence of lyrical surprise draws attention to the absence of music. But those are exceptions; these songs are mostly exceptional.