The Wonderful World of The Pursuit of Happiness

If the Pursuit of Happiness never return to recording, I will always be glad they left with this album, as opposed to any other. The Wonderful World of The Pursuit of Happiness was one of the most interesting albums of the 1990's. About thirty minutes long, yet still featuring 14 songs (13 songs and a thirty-second cacophony-and-harp intro), there are no wasted notes and no overdrawn ideas. If a song should be one minute long, it is; because of this, one finds oneself listening to the whole thing regularly.

The variety of styles and musical ideas on this record is wild ; the band are more free with the form than ever. References to multiple decades of pop/rock music show up, in instrument choices and song styles (I am always happy to hear a little analog synth lick, and the vocoder is way under-used in the world of geetar).

Tara,a boppy ode to infatuation, replete with trumpet solo and the tinkling of chimes, starts the song suite off in a burst of optimism, but is cut off abruptly when the lyrics become too insipid. Heavy metal ideas ("Pray to god to give you wisdom - he can save you from your carnal prison - Stay away! She's the devil!") and sounds (Berg's unrecognisable, distorted screaming) blast out of She's The Devil, one of the album's singles. Sound effects that could be They-Might-Be-Giants-Silly are somehow tasty and rocking in Tara's Theme. Tracks mix and meld into each other nicely -- a pain when it comes to making mixed tapes, but otherwise cool.

This is definitely the funniest TPOH album: Moe Berg is in fine form on lyrics that both idolise and skewer love. The album courses through the stages of love: infatuation and beginnings initially, pleading and worship mid-way, hate and resignation in the end.

	You've got bourgeois aspirations 
	I've got proletariat affectations
	I'm all white t-shirt and beer
	In front of one of Moses Znaimer's TV stations
	You don't even have a TV
	You like Bjork and Oasis
	You're not smart enough for Shakespeare
	But hip enough to think Merchant of Venice is racist
	Now that the truth is out, 
	I hated you first
			-The Truth

The Theme from Friends is parodied cruelly (brilliantly) in I Like You: ("I'm not so special, like I could have anything I see - I like you because you like me"). Carmalina is an ode to a stripper who makes the narrator feel like a member of KISS. A woman passing by the window of the Diplomatico becomes a receptacle for dreams ("What book you reading there? Would it change my opinion of you?"). The band's best ballad ever, Back Of My Mind, features some of Berg's best singing and saddest lyrics ("...when we touched, you were never more than kind/ I stored that somewhere in the back of my mind").

This is a great record, and a fine ending if TPOH are truly finished. If Star Wars can finish off this nicely, I will be a happy man.

 

---

TPOH: The Wonderful World of The Pursuit of Happiness. Iron Music, 1996.
Review by jep clayton, BadMonkeyX. 1st issue, January 2001.

---