The Headphones
This is a confusing album, though not so much in its sound or lyrical content. Those can be succinctly described as the Postal-Servicing of Pedro the Lion. David Bazan and TW Walsh, the two permanent members of Pedro the Lion, forgo guitars on this album for minimalist synth and live drums.
Minimalism already being a primary aesthetic, it means that Bazan has just switched to keyboards. He still manages to bring along [critics of Pedro the Lion’s last album, Achilles Heel might say “bring back”] his bardic storytelling and eagerness to explore things the rest of the indie world seems uncomfortable with. Things like God and stuff.
“Major Cities” is a protest song framed as a lesson from father to daughter.
I agree this doesn’t favor me / still bullies have to get what’s coming
He says, as bombs fall around them. He doesn’t want to die, but can’t escape the feeling that he and his country have brought this on themselves. Bazan’s keyboard is slightly off the beat at times, making the simple melody feel like it’s coming out of a child’s music box. You can only expect to get what you give; he doesn’t mince words, and the message is given tremendous power by the setting and circumstances. We teach our children fair play, then ignore those lessons in our foreign policy.
“Natural Disasters” also takes up the theme of bullies. This time, though, they are trying to get Jesus in their posse.
Now I know we disagree / But soon enough we will all be free / to worship any way I choose.
Bazan sees in our current political climate the same thing he sees in almost all of [contemporary American Protestant] Christianity: rigid theological [and political] dogma masquerading as religious [and personal] freedom.
And now we’re taking over, and no one is the wiser / With Mexican and Negro Cabinet advisors.
Anglo-centrism, dominionist ideologies, flat taxes and greater executive powers presented as smiling, obedient, multi-ethnic throngs.
See also: Wolves in sheep’s clothing.
These are the same matters Bright Eyes frequently attacks with venom. The twist here, though, is that, while Connor Oberst is dubious of religion in general, Bazan feels his is a peaceful faith that has been hijacked by rabid jingoists.
The next track, “Hello Operator” is a surrealistic narrative of a man’s plan to possess his ex-lover’s telephone and strangle her with the cord. Here the grimness of his subject is given a strange levity; hope that the bitterness he feels will be quieted by indulging his barbarism. It’s a pointless fantasy, and you can tell this person isn’t capable of murder, but the catharsis he feels just plotting it is electric.
Bazan tackles his impulses with an openness that would make Jimmy Swaggart blush, at once asserting and lamenting that finding God doesn’t mean losing your humanity. The Headphones finds him in excellent form.
The arrangements, too, show a step back from Achilles Heel’s more elaborate arrangements and less elaborate stories [coming dangerously close to, you know, ordinary pop]. So I guess The Headphones is a side project in a strict sense. At the same time, though, it’s really not.
Granted, there’s no guitar, but Pedro the Lion has never been defined by its guitar work. The essential element is Bazan’s novelistic, frank and explosive examinations of faith and fidelity. Against that style and those themes, Achilles Heel was more of a side project than The Headphones are.
Meaning that, despite the synth and the hipper, more urban moniker, The Headphones are Pedro the Lion, with all the angst, theology and swearing that entails.
Bazan remains a weary cynic searching for redemption. As long as he keeps writing songs like this, one hopes that someday, somewhere, he’ll find it. In the meantime, artists like Bazan and Sufjan Stevens embody my own hope that more bands will begin to stab at issues of faith without traipsing headlong into the unctuous void--the staid, artless barrens--of Christian Praise Rock.
On that day I will, in Bazan’s words: “Rejoice.”
