Published on Jun 20, 2000
“Never judge an album by its cover.” I still swear by that. But,
with Aimee Mann’s latest,
Bachelor No. 2, its hard not to: it’s so slim that I’ve lost
it three times in the past 3 weeks, it’s been in a sea of paperwork
and bills each time. The good news though:
Bachelor No. 2 is so quirky and flat out good, you’re
willing to kill a half hour to search your apartment for it.
Mann, once passed on from label to label like a beer bong at a
greek party, knows how to market herself. With the success of the
Magnolia soundtrack, which featured mostly Mann’s tunes,
Bachelor No. 2 has three of those gems on it. And they’re
close to the back of the album, forcing you to listen to her new
material while keeping you fixed as you wait for the familiar tunes
near the end of the album.
Mann’s voice is reminiscent of her peers, such as Lucinda
Williams and even Margo Timmons of the Cowboy Junkies. And with the
help of Jon Brion (who orchestrated Fiona Apple’s majestic
When the Pawn…) Pearl Jam guru Brendan O’Brien and her
beau, Michael Penn, Mann is able to forge an original voice that’s
unmistakable, for most of the time.
On tracks like “How Am I Different,” “Red Vines” and “It Takes
All Kinds,” she veers dangerously close to sounding like a Prozac
spokesperson. But other tracks, such as the orchestrated “Calling
It Quits,” the coolly playful “The Fall Of The World’s Own
Optimist” and “Satellite” give the album a much needed
cohesiveness.
Lyrically, Mann veers from being flat out brilliant to a really
good writer in an introductory to Poetry Class in college. In fact,
the opening lines of “Ghost World” have been uttered by far too
many students I know already. “Finals blew, I barely knew my
graduation speech/and with college out of reach/if I can’t find a
job…” Yes, good poetry does mean simplicity sometimes, but
the overdramatic chorus just doesn’t gel with the plain, spoken
account of the first part of the song.
As original of a talent as Mann is,
Bachelor No. 2 reaches greatness on certain occasions while
leaving other songs to float aimlessly in between. Maybe it was
Mann’s stress with shopping the album around to a different label,
but the album just doesn’t have the mournful, beautiful flow that
Magnolia had that gave her a new life in the music world.
Still, her voice and playful arrangements keep you coming back to
Bachelor No. 2 and it remains a frontrunner for “Best album
to listen to while you’re bummed” so far this year.