‘Em Are I

We Say...

Review by Mark Kemp

On his fourth proper album of original songs, Jeffrey Lewis isn’t just confessing his awkwardness like some anti-folk Woody Allen, as he’s done on previous releases. This time he’s swallowing big, fat sobs. Somebody has ripped out his heart and handed it back to him on a plastic white cutting board, arteries flapping about like earthworms, valves choking blood.

“Broken, broken, broken heart,” the comic-book artist and singing historian deadpans over an acoustic punk backdrop. “You just hurt, hurt, hurt inside of me, every minute, every night and day.”

Lewis has been pegged as a bohemian smartypants who uses wit and lo-fi production to distance himself from real emotion, but such pigeonholing is too simplistic. ’Em Are I certainly has its quota of black humor. Over the mandolin-fueled bluegrass-punk stomp of “Whistle Past the Graveyard,” he sings of not wishing to hear corpses “discuss how much they want to eat my brain.” But the real agony of a first heartbreak runs through this set like an EKG readout. Over acoustic guitars, droning electronics and a Mo Tucker-like beat in “If Life Exists,” Lewis protects himself by questioning why people equate happiness with having lovers. And in “To Be Objectified,” he ponders the process of growing old and bald in a body borrowed from nature: “I’ll tell the earth, ‘Thanks for the hair, thanks for the skin, thanks for the bones.’”

The music on ’Em Are I runs from raw, churning punk (“Slogans”) and spare, traditional-sounding folk (“Bugs and Flowers”) to psychedelic surrealism (“Mini-Theme: Moocher From The Future”) and what might be characterized as anti-fusion. The latter comes in the album’s centerpiece, “The Upside-Down Cross” — an exhilarating, eight-minute wash of driving bass and drums, keyboards, feedback, distortion and muted, Miles Davis-inspired trumpet.

Whether drawing or singing, Lewis paints rich, deeply complex portraits of modern life in clean, simple lines. His heart may have been damaged by his recent breakup, but Lewis’ creative mind is still pumping.