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Warner · Atlantic | genius.com |
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"I have a life of pleasure /
I am submerged in armchair leather /
I put my feet on the ottoman /
Empire”
It is with infectious glee that Moxy Früvous lean into this incredibly dumb pun, deftly balancing political satire with the joy of groanworthy wordplay. Woven through the band’s discography is a bright thread of liveliness, intertwined with a streak of pacifism, that together can link the most incongruous subjects.
Texturally, Bargainville is broken from the familiar mould of nineties indie music. Several men intone nasally over spindly production. Broad, flat expanses of guitar and drumkit clatter against each other, garnished here and there with a drizzle of harmonica or a squeeze of accordion.
Which is not to say they aren’t just a little bit kooky, Heavy Metal Umlaut notwithstanding.
(Josh’s Pedantry Parenthetical: the diacritic in question is only called an umlaut when modifying the sound of the vowel it’s attached to, like it does in German. It can also be placed on the second of two consecutive vowels to indicate that they belong to separate syllables — you may have seen this in the likes of ‘naïve’ and ‘Noël;’ the style guide for The New Yorker recommends ‘coöperate’ and ‘preëmptive,’ stylings that have fallen out of standard usage in contemporary English — in which case it is called a diaeresis. As you were.)
Bargainville pulls off a difficult balancing act. Comedy about renting videos and Prince and the Pauper-style switcheroos rubs shoulders with heftier fare, including at the album’s centrepoint a eulogy for a friend who chose not to live through the Cold War (“Drunk on the lawn in a nuclear dawn / My senses finally blurred”). It is to their credit that such extreme shifts in mood do not cause whiplash, and indeed flow as naturally as their sinewy barbershop harmonies.
For the album’s finale, Moxy pen an ode to a certain celebrity canine (“They put a dog in space / And left her there / You should have seen her face”), then segue imperceptively from an interpolation of the original sixties Spiderman theme into a touchingly weary anti-war ballad (“Fighters for liberty, fighters for power / Fighters for longer turns in the shower”).
Moxy Früvous are highly recommended for fans of dork-rock as championed by They Might Be Giants and Jonathan Coulton. Though lacking the former’s surrealist tendencies and the latter’s flair for the fantastical, after toning down the wackiness a notch or two Moxy ground themselves in something far more engaging: emotional heft.