Ted Leo is a guy I’m mostly familiar with because of his friendship with a couple of people I really love, Aimee Mann and Scott Aukerman. He’s collaborated with Mann and he’s been on Aukerman’s Comedy Bang Bang Podcast a handful of times. This is the first of his proper albums I’ve given a listen to and it’ll probably be the last. I don’t mean to say that it’s that bad, but it’s not particularly good either. It’s kind of interesting that he’s clearly a lyricist in the singer/songwriter mode, but his band cooks like hard. So, you’ve got very elliptical, poetic (often downright pretentious if I’m being blunt) lyrics, but backed up with these grinding hard-rock riffs and searing guitar hooks. That’s, you know, someone besides me could, and probably has, done a whole essay about the fusion of those two things, but I’ll skip it. And I’ll say that it is immaculately produced; in a hard rock style, so it’s grungy, but it sounds fantastic really. I quite liked Under the Hedge, the closest thing to a memorable pop song here, and Timorous Me, which just has a great, slowly evolving sound and lyrics that revolve around the same kind of thing Morrissey used to call a “shyness that is criminally vulgar.” The rest of the album isn’t bad, but it’s also just kind of there. “I’m not the great communicator that I used to be apparently,” Leo sings on one song. Well, okay, that is a good lyric, but it’s also kind of true. 2 stars.
tl;dr – marriage of bookish, intricate lyrics and hard-rock sound is slightly interesting, but there’s only a couple of good songs here at the end of the day. 2 stars.