plorentz's Full Review: The Airborne Toxic Event by The Airborne Toxic Eve...
The hopes and dreams of most aspiring novelists are all too often dissolved like so much salt into the plain, colorless, tasteless water of respectable careers as teachers, advertising executives and clergymen. But the heretofore thwarted literary ambitions of L.A.-based aspiring novelist Mikel Jollett have been channeled into an unlikely rock ‘n’ roll fantasy. Never mind that Jollett doesn’t have much of a singing voice, or that his musical vision is a sloppy scramble of every hipster trend of the last thirty-or-so years, the dude, over the last couple of years, has managed a small degree of credible rock-stardom with his band The Airborne Toxic Event (he got the name from a Don DeLillo book), whose self-titled debut, released more than a year ago, has been rising to slow boil on the radio, thanks to a relentless touring schedule and bleakly romantic, autobiographical confessionals like “Sometime After Midnight”, a song about a salt-in-wound encounter with an ex-girlfriend in a bar that builds to the kind of heightened, almost adolescent crescendo you might find in a John Hughes movie. The song’s dramatic string-section intro simultaneously recalls “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS and wedding processional where Adam Sandler gets jilted in The Wedding Singer.
Jollett’s voice is damaged goods, but he sings with a theatrical recklessness and he writes with a self-immolating (and brutally literate) wit so that he comes across like a cross between Joe Strummer and Jarvis Cocker. That the band is older and were likely first-hand witnesses to the brittle, post-punk atmospherics of classic 4AD imports, the folky boho storytelling of Billy Bragg (see “Missy”), as well as the lo-fi 90s makes their scratch-and-dent reproductions of all of the above – chopping high treble guitar figures, bouncy new wave bass lines, eerie washes of synth and string - feel undeniably authentic and maybe even a little more emotionally resonant, as if they’re using their own teenage vocabularies to express their thirty-something angst, their fears of disease and loss and loneliness (all of which figure as heavily in the band’s bios and they do in the band’s songs). Jollett’s self-esteem takes beating after beating in his songs. He’s always getting dumped. He’s always getting drunk. He’s “such a bore.” He’s “such a mess.” In one of the album’s catchiest moments, an acerbic re-write of Mouth & McNeels’ 70s bubblegum hit “How Do You Do?”, Jollett knowingly asks a really dumb question: “Does This Mean You’re Moving On?”
The answer, of course, (that would be a “yes”) had already been given in the song “Gasoline”, which is what “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” would have sounded like if it had been written by The Rezillos and ended with the girl dumping the guy after getting him to promise that he would love her ‘til the end of time. But, as evidenced in one of the album’s best tracks “Happiness is Overrated”, the boy keeps his promise-by-the-dashboard-light, regardless. In the song’s raw, Tex-Mex rockabilly ballad opening, Jollett sings as if channeling one of Roy Orbison’s romantic tragedies from beyond the grave – ’cause losing you is something I always did so well – but the shout-along chorus – sorry, I merely lost my head – both triumphant and fatalistic, is like a high school drama-geek’s attempt to be The Clash and it culminates in a nerdy guitar figure which turns out to be one of the record’s strongest hooks.
For as depressed and self-absorbed as it all could have been, The Airborne Toxic Event reveals itself over repeated listens as an almost annoyingly endearing record. If for nothing else than the fact that Mike Jollett writes and sings like the bookish 30-something ex-office working, freelance writing schlub he is. His songs, as derivative as they may often seem, are the inevitable by-product of several failed relationships, a gradually failing body, a creeping sense of age-consciousness, and a passionate affection for the music, movies and books of his ever-more-distant youth.
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This album is available on vinyl, and the LP version comes with a CD.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
“The Airborne Toxic Event” by The Airborne Toxic Event
MajorDomo Records
Released 8/5/08
Produced by Pete Min and The Airborne Toxic Event
37 min.
SONGS: Wishing Well – Papillon – Gasoline – Happiness Is Overrated – Does This Mean You’re Moving On? – This is Nowhere – Sometime Around Midnight – Something New – Missy - Innocence
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