Cons: the heavy-handed cliches of almost everything else
The Bottom Line: There's two big concepts here - relishing happiness and embracing the feminine side. Sadly, neither concept is executed with any sense of elegance or grace.
DrFaustus's Full Review: The Rebirth of Venus [PA] [Digipak] by Ben Lee
Who doesn't love a good rhetorical question? Really, is there any more elegant way for someone to humbly make a point? Should I stop here before I go overboard with these rhetorical questions to start this off?
Okay, all inanity aside, rhetorical questions can really add some punch and panache to writing when used effectively, but there's always the risk of a backfire when you use them - the change that there might be an obvious answer to your non-question that just so happens to differ from the point you were trying to make. That can be kind of embarrassing, much like's Ben Lee's new album Rebirth of Venus, which opens up with the track What's So Bad About Feeling Good, and then proceeds to provide the answer - the downside to feeling good is that it apparently leads musicians to write overly saccharine, overly sentimental, overly syrupy musical pap that has little going for it besides cheep sentimentality.
I know that Lee had the best of intentions for this album. He wrote and recorded Rebirth of Venus after his recent marriage to actress Ione Skye, and he sites the overflowing happiness he felt afterwards, along with learning to get in touch with his feminine side, as his main inspiration. I've no doubt that such feelings can lead to great songs, but there are just so many examples of slipshod songwriting and too much of a cloying, wide-eyed, aw-shucks innocence that it's a tiresome chore to get through the album.
Not that there aren't some bright spots. That first track mentioned above with its bold rhetorical question of a title is a solid example of catchy singer-songwriter pop. With its synthesizer riffs set to sound like chimes, its bouncy bass lines, its sharp electric guitar counter rhythms, its sing-along chorus of "no guilt, all pleasure, come on, I want to hear you yell it," and so many other classic pop hooks, it's the kind of song that really does make us feel good to listen to.
Those feel-good elements, though, need a little moderation to work, though, lest they get overwhelming and start to sound artificially forced. As move a little deeper into the album, Lee loses all sense of necessary restraint, and the results are a saccharine mess that hits us over the head and drags us off unconscious, rather than subtly enticing us to follow along.
Surrender, for example, starts off well enough with a sharp Byrds-esque Rickenbacker guitar riff, but when the lyrics start up and every single vocal line is echoed back by full choir of backup singer (who seem strangely unenthusiastic), the song devolves into little more than a cheesy campfire sing-along. Later on, Sing purports to be another feel good sing-along, but repetitive verses like:
♬ you can find it anywhere
you can find it anywhere
you can find it anywhere
you can find it anywhere
you can find it anywhere-ere-ere ♬
and series of "la la la la la calls-and-responses that are simple chromatic scales with all the subtlety and grace of middle school choir warm-up exercises, the song as a whole sounds like a first draft that never got the refining treatment it deserved. His attempt at sly, winking sarcasm with Bad Poetry commits the exact foible it means to skewer, serving up lyrics such as:
♬ loving you
makes me wanna spill my heart and soul
loving you
makes me wanna tell you things you've never been told
loving you
makes me wanna write bad poetry ♬
never managing to rise up and work on multiple levels, and wasting the bluesy, Ben Folds inspired piano riffs that make up the base of the song. Lee also tends to fall back a little too often on a spoken-word-set-to-dreamy-pop-riffs technique, particularly on Wake up to America, a song that manages to pander to the audience with its message of "I know you're a good country, America, you've just made some poor choices lately," while at the same time comparing the American dream to making out with two girls at the same time at the Lincoln Memorial.
Lee also muddies things up by letting the thematic exploration of his feminine side run roughshod all over the album with all the nuance and subtlety Godzilla marauding through downtown Tokyo. Boy with a Barbie, full of electro-pop and lyrical criticism of traditional children's toys, Yoko Ono, bristling with up-tempo acoustic guitar rhythms, sets forth the desire to be liberated from the patriarchal hierarchy just as Yoko did for John Lennon, and I'm a Woman Too gets lost amongst its falsetto do, dah do dah, do do's as Lee declares his empathy for every marginalized woman out there, copping Helen Reddy's "hear me roar" line to hammer home the point. These are by no means terrible sentiments, it's just that Lee shoehorns them into song form so ham-fistedly that they're tough to take at face value.
Despite all these awkward moments and musical miscues that make Rebirth of Venus such a arduous chore to sit through, it still deserves credit for one of the finest feel-good pop songs of the year. After a series of disappointing tracks, Lee gives us I Love Pop Music, which practically wallows in modern pop cliches – hand claps, short sharp guitar licks, counterpoint vocal lines, baroque piano riffs, "sha la la vocal fills, and so much more. The lyrics are anything but subtle, with it's spoken verses of the ills of the modern world and its choruses of how good it feels to feel good. Calling it empty pop psychology would certainly be a fair criticism, but the song is far too catchy for me to mind. I Love Pop Music stands out from the rest of the album, though, since Lee actually sounds like he's having fun here. Almost every other moment on the album feels forced and awkward, but not here. The album's sentiment of feeling good for the sake of feeling good genuinely shines through here, and it's impossible not to get caught up
Ben Lee is certainly an accomplished pop craftsman. Anyone who might have any doubts just needs to listen to his Awake Is the New Sleep from a few years back. That album had enough pain and sadness mixed in with its pop energy to keep it grounded, though, and that's what's missing here for much of the album. I'm glad for Lee's newfound happiness in the world, but without a little of the bad mixed in with the good, it's like putting up with someone going through an extended manic episode. I still look forward to hearing more from Lee in the future, but I hope he manages to balance out his giddy love of life with a little bit of melancholy before then. In the mean time, I'll have to be content just to play I Love Pop Music over and over, skipping most everything else on this album.
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