Fewer Moving Parts - David Bazan

"I still run the show / Don't you forget it"

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” - Miles Davis

The opening lyrics of David Bazan’s Fewer Moving Parts explode out of incendiary drum fills, bursting like snare grenades. Such is the character of Bazan, who wields an axe on the cover and makes kindling of the last tall tree in the forest inside the liner notes. Bazan the woodsman, cutting down critics and the self-righteous along with friends and fans with preconceptions. This is David Bazan, 31 year old solo musician, and damn the regrets. He ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

With fewer moving parts come fewer broken pieces, Bazan assures us, and to reassure, and reiterate, each track on the 2006 EP comes with its own acoustic doppelganger. Though this technique usually seems like insulation, these rough B-sides refuse to be stolid, and instead flip a backlight on their slicker electric counterparts, revealing the snakes and spider’s nests within.

What to do with this? How to critique a record that castrates criticism in its first acrid stanzas: "You're so creative / With your reviews / Of what other people do / How satisfying that must be for you"?

It's disturbing. Lyrics like “Every time I find a girl beaten, gagged and bound / I let her go and write it down / That’s how I remember” are cold punches. They cut out your senses and leave you winded, grasping for your bearings. Upon examination, however, they are elusive - there was impact, but where is the wound? Why is the destruction of five or six “innocent” automobiles in “Cold Beer and Cigarettes” so heartbreaking?

Perhaps it’s Bazan’s inimitable sense of meter - Bazan writes like Keith Moon drums, recklessly in control, leaping measure to perilous measure, punctuating with blinding little miracles like “Cold Beer”’s “What a cruel God we’ve got / Right on.”

Maybe, rather, Bazan has played a trick on himself. Vowing to work harder to compensate for perceived lack of talent at the outset of his career, Bazan has labored over a decade to reach this album's caliber of songwriting. The end result is a bold, cold little handful of rock diatribes and their acoustic counterparts that, really, does not impress with any great wordsmithing (aside from "hatriots" - fantastic) or heavy-handed aphorisms declaring the Nature of Things.

Thank God.

“David Byrne on Bob Costas put it pretty well, but I put it better.”

A David Bazan song, that oddity among musical oddities, rarely ends without a single-word punch, such as the "away" that sealed up 2004’s Achilles Heel. The endless, heartrending coda to the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is evident in the outro to “Backwoods Nation,” as though Bazan bears the same pain of longing for a nation that doesn’t exist anymore, or, perhaps, gut remorse at the epiphany that it never has.

Do not listen to this album on an empty stomach. This album generates the same feeling as mild electrocution, picking up a frayed cord in a puddle of water, the hot fire preceding cold paralysis, the feeling of terrible surprise, electricity coursing through the fingers, up the arm, and into the spinal cord.