plorentz's Full Review: The Forgotten Arm [Digipak] by Aimee Mann
…And then she took up boxing. Some broads take up yoga, or pilates, or daytime talk shows, but she always said that there was only one thing she loved more than writing songs, and that was sparring – the word sounded so strange coming out of those sharp, taut lips of hers, coming out of that no-skin-off-my-back detachment. But she loved the ring, felt viscerally alive there, even if she apologized every time she got a good punch in. Yep. She took up boxing. That’s just the kind of doll she was I guess. And that’s where The Forgotten Arm started. In the ring.
I always knew she was a fighter. I mean, the way she went after those major labels back in the 90s. She was no preening George Michael, I can tell you that. She didn’t have to prove to the world that she was an artist; she was just tired of being made over by pin-striped wise-guys in fancy offices. But that’s not the fight she brings to the ring. She’d say she’s not angry in there – that you can’t be, that you gotta leave it behind, that you gotta be careful on an emotional level, cause it’s gonna get bloody on the physical side. That’s the way she puts it anyway, and I got no reason to doubt her. After all, that’s the way she writes her songs. She’s careful with the melodies – everything’s gotta be in it’s right place - because the words are gonna hurt.
The Forgotten Arm, you ask? Well, it’s a boxing move some friend of hers made up. Total drug addict, but also a boxer. And watching him all those years, taking the 12 steps toward rock bottom, the 12 steps back, and back down, and back up again, she made up a character she called John – a Vietnam Vet, a boxer, a drug addict, a real prize this one. But impossibly sexy too, as such unsavories tend to be. So she made up a gal for the bastard, called her Caroline – doesn’t really matter who she was really, only that she was the kind of doll to fall for the kind of sap John was. Just like that song about how much it hurts to feel so much tenderness, and how she’d like to break it off, but, baby, you’re so, so beautiful. Something like that. “Beautiful”, it’s called. Beautiful it is. But with a rotting inside. Like how you eat a peach, and it’s all soft and sweet and juicy, and then there’s this hard, ugly pit at the center of it.
She wrote a whole record of this stuff, a pretty rockin’ record too, if clean-crafted, classicist pop with a 70s radio bent to it trips your trigger. She even made up some kind of story for these two. Nothing real specific, mind you, just some riff-raff about running away to California, tryin’ to leave all their woes behind, and in the process realizing that, no matter where they go, or how fast they get there, they carry their woes with themselves. They’re their own woes, get it? He talks about how he can’t live sober and he can’t live loaded, about how much he wants to be with her and about how much he wants her to leave him, about how there’s something wrong with him that even he can’t see. Standard addict talk, really.
But she would say that this isn’t really about addiction, and I’d tend to agree with her. With all the fancy-schmancy vintage pulp novel art direction, she’d want us to believe that this is a story or a concept. Oh yeah, and most monkeys would have us believe they like their bright pink behinds hanging out like that all the time. It’s all semantics, babies. Sure, she started with a concept. She started with boxing. She started with John and Caroline and running away, but as the time counter runs out on this little platter, you know that whatever all that concept stuff was, it was just a way to write a few good songs, to make ‘em stick together, to make ‘em stand out together in a catalog full of good songs that sound a lot like these. And I’ll be that monkey’s uncle if they don’t. Change the story line, change the character names, maybe add a little Bachara-zzle-dazzle to the arrangements, and songs with intriguingly explanatory titles like “That’s How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart” and “I Can’t Get My Head Around It” coulda been contendahs for the Magnolia soundtrack, or some other upcoming P.T. Anderson flick. Hydrangea, maybe. Dahlia. Friggin’ Hosta, even.
It’s no-brainer type stuff for a guy like Paul Lorentz (that pansy!), especially with those lush illustrations of semi-naked male torsos crumpled together in combat, bulbous muscles twisted like fleshy wreckage, glowing under stage lights and the eyes of a thousand unseen spectators, a moment of titillating man-on-man action captured in rich, shadowy hues and sleek, active brush-strokes. He’s the kind of guy who’d tell you the record was worth it just for the artwork, that the uniformly excellent songwriting is almost overshadowed by it, that the pleasure he derives from looking at The Forgotten Arm is ultimately greater than the considerable pleasure he gets listening to it.
Of course, as soon as it’s out of his mouth, he’ll be quick to change the subject to how much he digs the dreary magnificence (because that’s the way pansies like him talk) of the horns in “King of the Jailhouse”, the urgency underlying the resignation in songs like “Good-bye Caroline” and “I Can’t Help You Anymore”, the pervasive sense of irresistible futility that hangs over the whole record like a sprig of Christmas mistletoe. As if all that smart talk would make us forget that he’s a degenerate. Some friggin’ guys, I tell you.
But then, he’d have a point too. That Aimee Mann. She’s one inscrutable doll. This new record? It’s just another one of her records, sure to be a critical favorite, or if not a critical favorite, than a hipster touchstone, a litmus test for the artsy-fartsies to show who really knows their stuff and who's just listening to Lite FM. If you know her, you're gonna like her. If you don’t know her, you probably never will. Unless you ever get in the ring with her. And then you’ll remember that blonde girlie with the pointy elbows who kept saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Every time she blocks one of your punches, “I’m sorry.”
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
“The Forgotten Arm” by Aimee Mann
SuperEgo Records
Released 5/3/05
Produced by Joe Henry
47 min.
SONGS: Dear John – King of the Jailhouse – Goodbye Caroline – Going Through the Motions – I Can’t Really Get My Head Around It – She Really Wants You – Video – Little Bombs – That’s How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart – I Can’t Help You Anymore – I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas – Beautiful
Aimee Mann songs have a literal quality to them, sharp, spare short stories set to music so it was probably inevitable that she would one day make a c...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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