Shake the Sheets

Can you feel yourself getting old? Can you feel yourself getting jaded? There's nothing you can do to stop it. Your once-torrid show-going pace has slowed to a crawl, you can no longer stand sitting through opening acts, you start wishing for anti-smoking legislation instead of bumming cigarettes, your back hurts. Older tracks begin to infiltrate your iPod, new albums have a shorter grace period before deletion, sometimes you chose to just read a book. You start to realize that the bands you're listening to are actually younger than you are, for the first time, and this realization finally breaks the dam you've built against constantly playing Spot-the-Influence. Past nostalgia starts to overtake present enjoyment, and no longer are you a first-order listener, frantically casting out nets to be the first one to the next big thing.

You know it's a bad sign when even the old reliables stop delivering, when their new release barely dislodges previous albums from your rotation, when you start pleading for them to play old songs live like your parents at a CSN concert. Want specifics? Let's take, oh, say Ted Leo for your example. You and Ted have crossed figurative paths for five years now, since the night he lent precious indie cred to your college house's basement by performing there accompanied by only a reel-to-reel (even though you feared booking a guy from some scary-sounding band called Chisel). From then on, you never re-met in person, but fan-love bloomed over rush hour singalongs to The Tyranny of Distance. While living in Leo's once-home of D.C., you attended most of his frequent visits, wrote gospel-like reviews about Hearts of Oak for a rambunctious webzine, and generally formed a one-man street team for the man and his Pharmacists.

Your first sign that relations might be fading was when Shake the Streets hit the file-sharing black market, and you were taken by surprise-- you hadn't even updated your wishlist. Now, months later, the usual Ted Leo delayed sink-in has yet to occur, despite frequent commute listening parties. Which begs the question: Is it you that changed, or is it Ted?

Or perhaps, more accurately, has Ted not changed enough? You can't help but notice that Shake the Sheets is the most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition. Gone is the more aggressively percussive approach of Hearts of Oak, the drum-circle assault of "Ballad of the Sin Eater" that took your head off more than once at dark Black Cat performances. The Pharmacists have receded back to a power trio format, a slight expansion from Leo's recent pretending-he's-Billy-Bragg jaunt, not attempting to toy with crooked arrangements or extraneous instruments.

Instead, Leo focuses on making a ruler-straight power-pop album, a facsimile of a late 70s punk-fed singer/songwriter LP with cover art featuring the artist against a solid-color background. You're less entertained by the Thin Lizzy flourishes, here on the other side of The Darkness' full-flung tributes. You're finding it more difficult to make Dexys comparisons, now that you're starting to appreciate how awesome Dexys actually was.

You also find yourself surprised that Ted Leo isn't taking advantage of his political timing-- a release date Michael Moore would kill for-- just as you're surprised to find yourself looking for political music at all. "Ballad of the Sin Eater" was the best description of ugly-American guilt you'd ever heard or read or danced to, so the relatively limp and general "I wanna sweep the walls of arrogance" criticisms of Shake the Sheets can't help but disappoint. Instead, you find Leo mired in unrepresentative cliché-driven lyrical content like, "It's time for getting down," from "Criminal Piece". But no, you shouldn't presume to know what Leo should sing about, you definitely should not presume that.

In a strange turn of events, you find yourself not as into Leo's usual tics: his unhinged vocals and spasmodic guitar. You find yourself strangely aggravated by Leo's characteristic punk-scat; especially unforgivable is a Jacko-like "shebooyah" in "Walking to Do". It doesn't help that most of these vocal detours are placed into songs ("Walking to Do", "Counting Down the Hours") that sound like the wait music for Splash Mountain.

But the question again: Is it you, or is it Ted? Is it silly for you to hold artists to the standard of constant evolution, dismissing all efforts to double-back on formerly fertile territory? Is it unfair to apply the context of your current musical frustration to the innocent victim of Shake the Sheets? Is constant self-awareness and within-review second-guessing drying up as a valid stylistic trick? Is it possible to be too subjective when you're writing opinion pieces? You wonder if the whole second-person device has really defused the self-indulgence of this very review.

Nevertheless, you hope your arbitrary ten-point scale score adequately conveys that, while disappointing, Shake the Sheets remains better than most of its current brethren in indie cryostasis. You feel a pang of guilt at holding Ted Leo to such high, possibly unreasonable standards, a pang of self-disappointment that you no longer have the iron constitution to be breezily dismissive of a review's ripple effects. But the largest pang of all is the stereotypical one of sadness, mourning the lost ability to follow a favorite artist down any path, the willful naivety to cloak any sub-par effort in the forgiving deafness of fandom. And then having to write about it.