The Facts of Life

Shocking. Disturbing. Scarifying. An uncompromising, fiercely honest work of uncompromising art that will rub your nose in the uncompromising dirt of your loveless existence, then dunk your head in an uncompromising toilet to clean you off, one that hasn't seen maid service in a while. But enough about Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer -- we're here to discuss the new Black Box Recorder album, The Facts of Life.

The Facts of Life is a good album, which seems better than it is mostly because the first BBR album was as pretentious as it was, which was very. This is one of the few bands I can think of who began with a completely original vision, then made a slick, commercialized second album full of lazy quotes from other bands, and can honestly call it a vast improvement. "The English Motorway System," to take the most obvious example, starts out sounding like something off Saint Etienne's Tiger Bay -- such as, oh, I don't know, "Like a Motorway." But by the time we get to the chorus, which directly quotes Suede's "Picnic by the Motorway," I knew I'd been outfoxed. The quotes are all part of the fabric, and this fabric is of unmistakably English origin. You'd have a harder time naming a British band who ISN'T part of this nocturnal collage than listing all the influences. Even The Beatles, who are from a completely different lineage, turn up in "May Queen," where the tune plucked from the guitar is taken from Lennon's "Julia."

What sets Black Box Recorder apart is their lyrical style, which thrives on weird juxtapositions that, if this were a film, would serve as revelatory CUTS -- like the cut from the shower drain to Janet Leigh's eye in Psycho. Incongruous connections that make some kind of elusive, uncanny sense are the order of the day. By the time we get to the eighth song, "Straight Life," you realize who's responsible for this -- Roxy Music. In their song "Every Dream Home a Heartache," whose title is paraphrased here by breathy singer Sarah Nixey, Bryan Ferry's love affair with a mail-order blow-up doll served as a truly disturbing, misogynistic metaphor for a parvenu's alienation from the rest of the world. Almost every song on The Facts of Life attempts something similar. The freeway is a major motif throughout, especially on "English Motorway" and "The Art of Driving," where the spiritual emptiness evoked by endless strips of halogen-lit road is contrasted, in the former, with Nixey's detached plea to her equally detached lover: "There are things we need to talk about." On "Gift Horse," Nixey talks about "digging up human remains" in the garden, then suddenly coos "I just want to be loved." You get the idea. It's stylish and all, but it never rises to the level of early Roxy, which was born of true insanity. Luke Haines, who writes most of the music for BBR, is a student in comparison -- this album feels way too blueprinted. Still, it's not every pop band who can draw comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis and David Lynch as well as the usual musical suspects.

More interesting, and less planned, is their conception of life as a Descartean inversion of reality and dream, where nothing ever really happens -- nothing sexual, that is, which is all BBR cares about -- except in your overheated imagination. The word "dream," in fact, makes an appearance on almost every song. In the chorus of the title track, Nixey plays the part of a rapacious Lolita, telling her young and insecure swain to "Walk me home from school / I'll let you hold my hand / You're getting ideas / That when you sleep at night / Will develop into sweet dreams." Her sultry voice makes it clear that dreams they are, and dreams they will always remain. "Girl on bus / Girl on tube / Brush against you / Look at you / Catch your eye / Conversation / In your dreams / In your dreams," she sings in an overwhelmingly arousing way on "Sex Life," with not a quaver of doubt in her voice that you are a complete loser whose every limb becomes jelly in the presence of buh, buh, buh... BREASTS! I could barely get the word out, it's so scary. But of course, people do approach people, and talk, and date, and have actual sex, and not just in their heads -- look around you, the world isn't exactly depopulated.

Wait a second. Does that mean that the world is a Black Box Recorder dream come true? The critics are right -- this album IS disturbing.