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Album Review

Know Better Learn Faster

Thao with the Get Down Stay Down
Know Better Learn Faster

[Kill Rock Stars; 2009]

7.8
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Despite the first-person plural pronoun in the title of Thao Nguyen's debut album, We Brave Bee Stings and All played like a very personal, at times even lonely, coming-of-age story. That album was lively but not light, an especially exuberant celebration of newfound musical possibilities. By contrast, her follow-up is the post-party comedown, a collection of hard-learned lessons about love, sex, and human connection. Know Better Learn Faster is a more mature record, slightly disillusioned with the world, but no less playful and with no less personality.

She and her backing band the Get Down Stay Down certainly live up to this album title: Know Better Learn Faster sports a fuller sound with more pop tricks and trickier arrangements that incorporate swirling Philip Glass-y keyboards on "Burn You Up" and Pavement slackness on "Good Bye Good Luck". New Orleans horns punctuate the imperative "Cool Yourself", and the shape-shifting "The Give" pairs her banjo with low guitar notes that draw out the distress in her lyrics. The band's energy rarely flags; instead the guitars grow only more manic and urgent as the album progresses. Vocally, Thao throws herself into the giddy pop of the title track and "When We Swam" with an abandon that contrasts nicely with the confessed uncertainties of "But What of the Strangers". On "Body" she plays the neglected woman with a wounded anger, questioning a distant bedmate while sounding a bit like Ghost of a Dog-era Edie Brickell-- no pan.

"Everybody please put your clothes back on," she commands on the loose, jangly "Trouble Was For". The things people do with their clothes off weigh heavily on her mind throughout the album, which is sure to generate unfairly prurient interest. She's no Liz Phair, though. Thao may be demanding, but she's never crude. "Bring your hips to me," she sings repeatedly and flirtatiously on "When We Swam". She can be desperate but never plays the victim. "What I am, just a body in your bed?" she accuses on "Body", before turning that the question in on itself: "Won't you reach for the body in your bed?" These physical details and pointed demands pop out of the songs, evoking a situation rather than describing it outright, in much the same way Lucinda Williams uses geographical details or Will Sheff breaks the fourth wall.

Know Better Learn Faster is an album of doomed relationships and what Thao calls "sad sex," and she comes across as a chronicler of a scene, reporting from a circle of friends and acquaintances-- perhaps the same ones who shout the choruses of "Good Bye Good Luck". That communal perspective is crucial to making this album sound much more extroverted than its predecessor. Projecting outward, she conveys a warm exuberance that keeps the music spry despite the weighty subject matter. Or, as she intones by way of introducing the boogie-shoegazer finale "Easy": "Sad people dance, too."

— Stephen M. Deusner, October 15, 2009


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