Aimee Mann - @#%&*! Smilers

The very nature of this record, its' essence, the spaces where the edges of songs come together, demands the listener to question their own expectations of pop music. That is whether or not it is the job of pop music in general to provide a catchy melody with which to sing along in the car to or should it be used as a device to shine a light on man's deepest desires and faults?

Such is the dilemma on Aimee Mann's sixth record, an attempt at bridging her compelling, some might say novelistic character sketches and pairing it with catchy sing- along choruses.

Not to get into an argument of the nature of pop music, or to suggest that artistic integrity is mutually exclusive with catchy melodies, but on Smilers she once again captures the bleak landscape of her characters as well as she did on her last two projects, The Forgotten Arm and Bachelor Number Two, as heavily sampled in the film Magnolia.

I say bleak landscapes, because for her inspiration this time around, Aimee found an online newsgroup entitled, and I swear to god someone better write a novel about this, Alt. Bitter, and on this newsgroup she found a jewel of a posting that referred to happy people in general as '@#%&! Smilers'.

And as difficult as that was to transcribe, it does work as an effective frame with which to hang the narratives of these thirteen down and out souls. We can view her songs as a complete narrative similar to 2005's The Forgotten Arm or as thirteen separate disparate threads that together make up a record.

And once again, Aimee Mann has the ability to precisely find that spot in a character's head that makes them different from everyone else. So in a refrain like "get up, you're borrowing time" we get to pilot the freewill of someone who is sitting idly by and watching life fly past them, or the emotional distance in a relationship where one wants the other but thinks that "I want you, but you're a poltergeist" and we see how often the theme of alienation falls under her microscope, "I got high on the Ferris Wheel, realized got what made me feel so alone. "

Drugs are a way to describe alienation, as they have been on the last few records, and one image I can't help but get out of my mind, in Paul Thomas Anderson's film, "Magnolia" is when the woman turned cocaine addict meeting and falling for the cop, and both of them unable to grab hold of life long enough to make it work, all while Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2 played in the background. It was a perfect pairing, because the characters in Aimee Mann's songs always seem to be reaching for something, something profound, a lack of answers or closure.

All of the characters on @#%&! Smilers face specific problems, and while on The Forgotten Arm she spun a wide yarn of a boxer and his girlfriends as they roamed the country in search of heroin and redemption, on Smilers, the problems don't have a specific place, but reveal those innermost problems we all have.

And therein lies the rub. While thanks to Mann's insightful lyrics that pinpoint the frailty, the addiction or neuroticism, there's this vague cloud cast over the remaining characteristics on the rest of the person she is describing, so we feel left out, more than we did before. And even though we only see this person for one song, we are left wanting to know more about this person, and their surroundings, but instead we move onto the next song, the next character.

Perhaps it's a sign when an album as strong as Smilers, where the melodies really grab you, but compared to the three pronged attack of The Forgotten Arm, -with a full narrative, more interesting arrangements, and a storyline that could easily be translated into a film -we can't help but come up a bit short.

Maybe Mann is just returning to writing songs, without a novelistic or cinematic arc. Maybe it's my fault, for needing the narrative in the first place.

"Maybe you'll wake up in jail alone and hold the handle of the one pay phone." She sings on Medicine Wheel, and I can't help but see the actions recorded in the song put to life by the cast of Six Feet Under, a Bukowski poem, or Raymond Carver Short Story, lost souls in Los Angeles, wandering across the great sprawl of city, in search of their next fix.

I suppose that this dilemma is my own cross to bear, but I'll gladly go back and construct an arc for these songs, time and again.