Corey Dargel, Someone Will Take Care of Me
Featured Album
Quirky, lyrical tales of dysfunction and delusion
Intimate, witty, and often kinda creepy, Corey Dargel's songs strike an uneasy balance between art and pop. Using some top-shelf musicians from New York's contemporary music scene and singing in a pop style (usually multitracked), Dargel spins quirky, lyrical tales of dysfunction and delusion. Someone Will Take Care of Me is a reassuring title for an album full of songs about people in desperate need of reassurance. In Thirteen Near-Death Experiences, the first of the album's two song cycles, Dargel is accompanied by ICE, the International Contemporary Ensemble, featuring drummer David T Little, for a series of skittering pop-inflected compositions. Imagine Franz Schubert composing a song cycle about hypochondria after listening to AM radio Top 40 and studying Thelonius Monk, and you might be prepared for "Twelve Year Old Scotch," or "Sometimes a Migraine Is Just a Migraine," or what I'm willing to bet is the first-ever art-song about Ritalin.
Even more unnervingly accessible is the second song cycle, Removable Parts, which takes a familiar love-song trope to its absurdist extreme. Old images of love hurting, blinding and tearing out one's heart are here turned into songs in which voluntary amputations are a metaphor for ways to deal with a lover's distance, or a lover's unwelcome closeness, or the singer's own self-doubts and lack of confidence. "Hooked For Life," where the singer's hands have been replaced by hooks, is a particularly clever and unsavory song: "You'll feel obliged to be sympathetic/ You'll let me hold you/ Even though you won't want to." "Toes" and "Hands" are equally unwholesome but winning compositions, and the finale, "Everybody Wannabe," is as catchy as it is disturbing — which is to say, very catchy. Dargel accompanies himself with a variety of electronic keyboards, and the gifted new music specialist Kathleen Supove plays piano — a neat, if distant, echo back to the old voice-and-piano tradition of the classical song-cycle.
