Barenaked Ladies: Ladies And Gentlemen

BARENAKED LADIES (AND THE PERSUASIONS): LADIES AND GENTLEMEN (2017)

1) Narrow Streets; 2) Gonna Walk; 3) Don't Shuffle Me Back; 4) The Old Apartment; 5) Keepin' It Real; 6) For You; 7) Some Fantastic; 8) Good Times; 9) Odds Are; 10) Sound Of Your Voice; 11) When I Fall; 12) Maybe Katie; 13) One Week; 14) Four Seconds; 15) I Can Sing.

Yes, well, okay, this is Barenaked Ladies using the pretext of performing with the veteran vocal band The Persuasions to re-record a chunk of their back catalog — or, perhaps, Barenaked Ladies using the pretext of re-recording a chunk of their back catalog to perform with The Persuasions. Hell if I know, hell if anybody knows. Why The Persuasions? Well, apparently a chance meeting with Kevin Hearn led them to appear at a Barenaked Ladies show in 2016, and supposedly there's been chemistry and all that, and now we have a lengthy, triumphant title: Ladies And Gentle­men: Barenaked Ladies And The Persuasions. And we are supposed to give a damn.

To be honest, I never heard The Persuasions before — as a strictly a cappella band, they never had much chart success, despite being put on the map by no less than Frank Zappa himself back in 1968 (come to think of it, maybe that is why they never had much chart success), and, as far as I can tell, their only more or less remembered minor hit was 1972's ʽGood Timesʼ, which happens to be the only Persuasions song covered here, with an entirely new rapped bridge creeping in mid­way through. This is probably not a major omission: the guys predictably generate slick, com­plex, pro­fessional harmonies, devoid of individuality. Why did Hearn and Robertson decide that utilizing these harmonies for Barenaked Ladies songs would make a lot of difference?

Well, it is probably not a matter of whether it is The Persuasions, The Impressions, The Tempta­tions, or The Fornications (spot the odd one out): it is more a matter of the band expressing a de­sire to remake some of its songs in a more consciously retro style. Look at ʽNarrow Streetsʼ, ope­ning the record: on Silverball, it opened in the style of classic New Wave, with a post-punkish guitar riff and a Cars-style organ dominating the sound, whereas here it opens with barbershop quartet vocals, and the entire arrangement consists of minimalistic bass, drums, and piano, with the vocals of the Ladies and the Persuasions bearing the main brunt of the melody, as if this were 1958 all over again or something. This does not mean that the entire album is going to be that way. Later on, we get our acoustic and even our electric guitars, and the style is not retro enough to make them re-write all the melodies in ways that would be appropriate for the Fifties — for instance, the hard-rocking swagger of ʽKeepin' It Realʼ is preserved fair and square — but the general idea is clear: to introduce the old, innocent vibe of the pre-rock era (the «authentic» vibe, that is!) into music that once used to herald the post-rock vibe (not in the Sigur Rós sense of the word «post-rock», but rather in the They Might Be Giants / Ween sense of it, of course).

Does it work? Well, not enough to make me judge that the action was really worth it. For starters, they could have sure picked a better setlist: I appreciate that they did not completely focus on the post-Page era, but on the whole, they picked quite a few boring clunkers — couldn't they have done ʽBrian Wilsonʼ instead of ʽWhen I Fallʼ, for instance? For another thing, too many tracks just do not differ that much from the originals, Persuasions or no Persuasions: much too often, «Ladies and Gentlemen» just sing in unison with each other (ʽOdds Areʼ), rather than thinking of more interesting ways — or even labyrinths — to distribute their collective vocal power. And finally, even when they do get it right (ʽMaybe Katieʼ, etc.), this is not enough to turn the songs into anything radically different. They were light, friendly, romantic, and humorous in the first place; spicing them up with soulful / doo-woppy vocals is, at best, like adding a splash of whipped cream on top of your icecream cone — most of the time you barely notice it is there.

None of this ain't bad, though. Well, a few of the songs are, but, fortunately, they did not take a lot of their dreary adult contemporary ballads (hardly suitable for Persuasions contributions any­way), so the record is largely listenable all the way through. And I guess that these days, Bare­naked Ladies still get more fans than The Persuasions do, so it should be counted as a generous gesture towards a hard-working bunch of vocal veterans who probably deserve better. But clearly this is just a stop-gap release, another harmless, but expendable oddity in the band's catalog that will not be remembered. And I have a deep fear that those few reviews for the album that I have encountered were all positive simply because the critics had already forgotten how those songs sounded or even where they all came from in the first place, and simply had fun listening to them all over again; so here's hoping that Hearn or Robertson do not run into Diana Ross or the re­maining Jack­son brothers any time soon, because there's still plenty of backlog tunes left to re­record for people with long term memory loss.