Pedro the Lion - Achilles Heel
Apparently a lot of people are upset about this album. Pedro the Lion, (read: David Bazan,) perhaps the indie world’s current songwriting champion, had promised that this album would be the conclusion of a three-album song cycle, a trilogy, so to speak. The first two albums “Winners Never Quit” and “Control” were both depressing and altogether bleak in outlook, but many fans were looking forward to the third album in the cycle because Bazan had promised that it would bring redemption to the trilogy. Surprise! There’s not a whiff of redemption here. In fact, unlike the other two albums, which were at least loosely tied together by an overarching theme and arguably had recurring characters, the only thing that’s thematically unifying about this album is its pessimism. Well, however hard it may be for some people to have their expectations ruined, the point of reviewing this album is not to wish for what it could have or should have been, but to take it for what it is.
Many might complain that this record does not cover any new ground for Bazan, but you have to admit that he’s awful good at feeling awful. The opener “Bands with Managers” has that trademark Pedro sound: Bazan stretching his pithy lines as the band bangs out every syllable of truth with a deliberate, almost inevitable, pace. Here, Bazan toys with a fear that the band’s tour bus will flip over and kill everyone. And guess what? This is most optimistic track of the whole bunch!
On so many of these songs Bazan’s ruminates on death: whether it’s homicide, “Discretion”, suicide, “A Simple Plan”, or perhaps a case where you can’t tell, homicide or suicide, “Transcontinental.” In each story, it’s like a slap in the face to have such well-crafted, catchy ballads matched up with such morbid lyrics. “Discretion” arguably has the most uplifting melody of them all, and yet here we have a grim tale of a hitman who was hired by an “asshole son” of a farmer to kill his dad. Instead, the hitman decides to kill the son first before carrying out the deed he was paid for: “The killer traveled eastbound in a golden sedan/Weighing his most recent deviation from the plan/Counting down the hours til the sun came up again/Had not decided between poison or a gun/When suddenly he decided he would not use either one.” The brutality gets worse on “Transcontinental” as Bazan describes a man either placed on a railroad track to be dismembered or who lay there willingly to end his life: “Engine severs lower legs/Feel my bruised heart beating/Spinal cord still intact/Still sending and receiving…Cargo rushing past…Click clack, now handicapped/North a.m. continental.” Even the tracks which do not directly involve mortality seethe with a sense of hopelessness.
The musicians’ work is solid, but instrumentation has never been the crux of Pedro the Lion. At most, the band’s playing provides a platform for Bazan to grapple with paradoxes and tell sad stories using his ever superb lyrics. The music is at its most telling when it most closely matches the tones or attitudes that Bazan is trying to emote with this words. Towards the end of “A Simple Plan” the band falls into a syncopated flourish just as Bazan delivers the line that reveals the heart of the song’s meaning, just as the character broods over whether to shoot himself: “It’s back to my bedroom alone with a shotgun.” Here the players quicken to the theme with an almost morbid eagerness. On “Keep Swinging” the band delivers sickeningly sweet barbershop harmonies as Bazan relates a story of a man who gets disgustingly drunk and barfs all over his apartment after wandering Chicago all night. The juxtaposition of the opposites is powerfully ironic.
Throughout the whole album, really, Bazan lets the words roll off his tongue with a sort of careless fatalism. Bazan seems to have become a man who feels equally debased by his faith and by his doubt, as is evidenced on “The Fleecing.” Notorious for his struggles with his Christianity, on this album he seems to have taken a step further down the road to feeling both useless and immutable regardless of what he chooses. To Bazan, either flip of the coin is a trick that will make him end up feeling humiliated. What does philosophical and religious wrangling matter, Bazan asks, when ultimately “you and I are nothing more than foregone conclusions?” A suitably cast-off synthesizer solo enters in so many of these tracks, seeming to be more proof of an attitude that says, “I’m just doing this because I have to.” It is this sense of pointlessness that Bazan has (sadly) captured so well on this album.
None of the characters, though they may not be obsessed with suicide per se, are “joiners” shall we say, when it comes to life. A new father muses to himself as he watches his son being born, “And when his tiny head emerged from hair and folds of skin/I thought to myself if he only knew, he would climb back in.” Or a family man who has lost his direction in being a husband and father turns to betting on horse races. Or a drunkard who won’t get sober until the day his wife returns. Did he become an alcoholic because his wife left him, or did his wife leave him because he was an alcoholic?
Needless to say, we can tell from the album’s title that this one’s about weakness. It becomes more difficult to draw the line between plunging oneself in pain that is self-inflicted and indulgent, and where the hard knocks are the genuine kind that life can really throw up in your face. There’s no doubt in my mind that David Bazan has put together a record that is both thoughtful and has plenty of artistic integrity. But I can’t help wondering if maybe his pessimism has gone a little too far. I admit, a little redemption would have been nice.
