INTERVIEW/ARTICLE/REVIEW:
Here is a review on Everclear's latest album, A Good Time For A Bad Attitude. I found this on the official site and liked it a lot. The author does a very good job.
By Mike Bell --Calgary Sun
SONGS FROM AN AMERICAN MOVIE, VOL. TWO: GOOD TIME FOR A BAD ATTITUDE Everclear (Capitol/EMI)
The songs of Everclear have always been remarkably similar -- a fact that was easy to overlook due to the lull between albums and the fact that, for the most part, they're a superb power pop rock trio with a knack for crafting memorable, hummable harder-edged music.
So it's surprising that the band, led by frontman and main songwriter Art Alexakis, have laid bare their unoriginality and inadequacies by releasing the second volume of their Songs From An American Movie collection so quickly -- a mere four months -- following the first installment.
Subtitled Good Time For A Bad Attitude, the CD picks up Alexakis' life story -- the discs are meant as a two-part telling of his eventful 38 years -- with Art down and on his way up, career-wise anyway.
Unfortunately, it's hard to care anymore. After Volume 1 -- and all of the other Everclear albums, for that matter, which are also deeply personal and confront the same subjects with the exception being that they're not wrapped in high concept -- it's difficult to connect with someone who's so utterly wrapped up in himself.
At least the first disc took time out from taking itself too seriously to lighten the mood a little. Bad Attitude is, for the most part, just another angsty white boy angsting about his angst-ridden life.
In fact, the music seems almost secondary to The Story of Art and His Angst. Then again maybe there's a good reason that the music takes a back-seat to the navel-gazing. While some of the songs kill the pop -- except in Alexakis' vocals -- in favour of the power, the melodies that remain are ones that Everclear have used previously. And often.
But maybe Art already knows that and that's where some of that angst is coming from. On the song Short Blonde Hair, he sings: "No one really understands/Just how simple and plain/And predictable I am." Well ... we do now, Art, we do now.
