Pitchfork

Sometimes you hear a song and think, "Hey, I could do that!" Half Japanese built an entire career making music that inspired such affirmations. This is not necessarily a bad thing-- in many cases it can mean that something's created spontaneously and from the heart instead of relying on technical proficiency to carry it through. But in some cases, as with Jad Fair's recent collaboration with Yo La Tengo, it results in a dull work that seems lazy and hackneyed.

There are two major problems with Strange But True: the concept and the execution. The concept is that every song (all of the lyrics were written by Jad's bro David) is based on a headline (real or fictional... who knows and who cares?) from cheesy tabloids like the Weekly World News-- y'know, those headlines about Zombies and Elvis and people doing strange- but- ultimately- not- true things. The tabloid headline, like the "Dropkick Me Jesus" school of country songwriting, is a marginally funny communal joke who's time has long since past.

So the songs on Strange But True begin with a headline such as "Helpful Monkey Wallpapers Entire Home" or "Ohio Town Saved From Killer Bees by Hungry Vampire Bats" and construct a little story around it. At best, this is bound to lead to a batch of songs (there are a mind- boggling 22 here) that you might chuckle at once or twice and toss on the occasional mix tape. But David Fair's lyrics fail to do anything interesting or clever with the ideas, so we're lucky if we even get that one chuckle-- they're mostly cliched and predictable quasi- nursery rhymes, with nary a surprise in the lot.

Make no mistake, when I look at Fair's lyric sheet and think about this lame angle, I most certainly think, "Hey, I could do that!" But I have never in my wildest dreams thought I could play the axe like Ira Kaplan. And Yo La Tengo's confident, varied musical backing is what saves this album from being terrible. Each song gets it's own unique treatment, and Kaplan's guitar sounds great whether it's doing that crazy vibrato wah-wah thing or churning through a distorted cruncher. But this is not enough to bump the album into "must buy" territory-- not even close. Ultimately, Strange But True is not nearly strange enough.