SMART BROWN HANDBAG: Monkey in the Middle

Smart Brown Handbag

Monkey in the Middle

© 2003 Smart Brown Handbag

CD IN STOCK. ORDER NOW. Will ship immediately.

tracks

1 Half Right
2 This Dance Is Free
3 My Favorite Argument
4 Let It Go
5 Green Room
6 Thin Shoulders
7 Sabrina
8 Stones Throw
9 Superstar
10 Disco Heels
11 I Know You
12 Sparkling Nights
13 Give You That
14 Cocaine and Cigarettes

notes

Like the accessory for which his band is named, singer/guitarist/songwriter David Steinahrt is practical and tasteful. He once had the shocking good sense to state in print, It's not that relationships are all that I have on my mind, but I do feel that I understand my limitations as a writer and I think that's something I write about well." Hey, who let all the fresh air in here? True, the world needs another jangly rock band the way Michael Stipe needs bus fare, but give a listen to their brand-new Monkey in the Middle album. For anyone who needs a little reassurance about that thing called love, Smart Brown Handbag's ouch that hurts anti luv songs, harmonies, bouncy bass lines and peppy rock-style riffing is just what the therapist ordered. Until Steinhart decides to keep matters of his heart to himself there's alot of mileage in this li'l handbag.
LA Weekly

Smart Brown Handbag: Monkey in the Middle
Early in "Green Room", the fifth song on Smart Brown Handbag's third (and thus David Steinhart's tenth) album, and therefore approximately David's one hundred and fourth oddly warped fractured-relationship song, he says, half to the girl and half to himself, as his narrations almost invariably are, "I have photographs / I could someday use; / I wouldn't say 'compromising', / As much as I'd say / 'The best of you'". It is as if he's threatening, it seems to me, not to reveal a past embarrassment, which could be disavowed, explained or forgiven, but to expose the thinly disguised bleakness of the present, which permits no such easy remedies. And in that one line is captured both my fierce faith in David's songwriting and storytelling integrity, and also my lingering disappointment, not so much with this album, but for it.
The photographs, in my meta-case, are some of those nine other albums. Steinhart's back catalog begins in times shrouded from our view by the fog of no-CD-reissue, with the 1984 debut EP by he and his brothers Jeff and Rich's jangly and unassuming California guitar band, Pop Art, who I usually describe either as a more brittle Translator, or as Los Lobos without the Hispanic influences. After the EP came the 1985 full-length A Perfect Mental Picture, 1986's Long Walk to Nowhere, their 1987 masterpiece (in my opinion) Snap Crackle Pop Art, and one somewhat uneven CD, Later On...In the Same Life, in 1989, after which the group disbanded. Steinhart then put out two slightly Costello-ish solo albums, Everything She Says (1992) and The Almighty Nest (1993), before returning to bandhood with Jeff and Pop Art alum Lyn Norton, as Smart Brown Handbag. SBH's self-titled debut came out in 1993, followed in 1994 by the spellbinding Silverlake, which only seven years of personal history keeps from supplanting Snap Crackle Pop Art in my affections. If you've heard of none of these records, I'm not surprised (the label they all appear on, Stonegarden Records, is Steinhart's own, and distribution, at least here on the coast opposite from its base, has been token at best), but I am sorry.
All three phases of Steinhart's career have been distinguished, for me, by three things. First, the first time I heard it, David Steinhart's singing sounded like me. That is, his voice on the radio sounded like my voice sounded to me in my head. Why this would matter to you I can't imagine, and since then I've had more opportunity to compare my recorded voice to his, a scrutiny under which the similarity does not stand up, but the chill the first time I heard him was unmistakable. Second, the way in which his voice winds around its words seemed, and continues to seem, subtly unique to me. Where most singers sing as if their text has become second nature, and their attention is on the notes to which they've set it, Steinhart's singing seems like the reverse to me, like the melody is something that guides his movement of its own accord, like a road guides a car, and thus leaves him free to concentrate on the story he's telling. When the score calls for a held note, whatever syllable he was in the middle of gets held, but when the music moves on, he finishes the word and continues with the rest of the sentence. I know of no singer who seems, as he sings, to relive his own narratives as vividly. And third, not unfittingly, David is one of the three lyric writers in the world who I think most brilliantly capture the nuances and truths of relationships. If each of the three have their own niche, then Del Amitri's Justin Currie finds hope in dissolution, Mark Eitzel finds dissolution in everything, and Steinhart's genius is in the telling details that explain why people compromise and settle, the facets of inescapable situations that explain their inexorable pull. David's songs are anatomies of equilibria that draw you in and show you the one easily-overlooked perspective from which a relationship's impossible stability seems rational, and what looks like paralysis turns out to be an unwillingness to move, not an inability. This doesn't sound cheerful, and in fact Pop Art's songs rarely were, but a story doesn't have to be cheerful to be moving, and in the same way that Raymond Carver's short stories are uplifting even at their bleakest, Pop Art songs always left me feeling, if not exactly better, then at least less imprisoned by my world.
Monkey in the Middle adds fourteen more songs to Steinhart's collection of empathic tableaux. "Half Right" is a meditation on a woman I'm not sure the narrator actually knows, and when he says "The curb by the car, / Allison's kneeling, / Purging the night / And my fickle love", I'm not sure whether she's rejecting him or just shattering his illusion. "This Dance Is Free" is like a later scene from the same story, and when he admits that "Love is the closest thing I know to hate", everyone is implicated. "Green Room" is at once a confession of enduring friendship and an unsettling plan for betrayal. "Thin Shoulders" is a relationship that simply expires under its own weight. "Sabrina" might be a father's touching ode to his daughter, but it also might be a desperately lonely factory worker obsessing over an underage girl. The narrator of "Stones Throw" can no more manage to fill his relationship than ("Living in a house so empty / The ghosts are afraid for their skin. / The first time she came to visit / She asked when I planned to move in") he can fill his own home. By "Superstar" he's transferred his dreams to a celebrity, which only serves to deepen his depression ("If I flinch at my reflection / How much would you see in me?"). When the chorus of "I Know You" can only manage those three words, it's because its subject's failure of nerve is too painfully familiar. And "Give You That" finds the narrator's hopes worn to such bare realism that the best he can think to ask for is "One night of sleep, / Ten hours with no dreams; / I could give you something / If I could give you that". Of the three songs that aren't about stifling or hopeless relationships, one is about loneliness so oppressive you long for a stifling, hopeless relationship ("It's Sunday morning, / And my first conversation / Is ten hours away"), one seems to be about preparing to commit suicide ("Twenty-eight floors up he thought, / 'With all the things I'll never know, / I'm certain now how far down / I have left to go'"), and the last one is a snapshot of an apartment building that seems like a claustrophobic half-sentient warren of human misery ("The air's alive and tense / Traveling through these vents"), and possibly one the narrator has been consigned to because of drug debts (though since there's nothing in the song to support the drug part of this hypothesis, I suppose it's just as possible that the narrator's penury is due to twelve years of financing his own record label).
Where Pop Art records never left me feeling depressed, though, to my dismay I find that this one does. For one thing, on previous records even the grimmest songs would have had clever narrative touches that deflected part of my attention from the material of the stories to the skill displayed in telling them, like the narrator of "Unholy Union" revealing that his blithe confidence that the woman will return is due to his having stolen her car keys, the odd landlord-tenant tension of the unrequited love story "Roommates", or the disappointment in "Almost Lost Her" being the "Almost". Here, though, these consolations are harder to find, and on several of these songs I drop my guard expecting a release, and only when the songs end before it arrives do I realize how much they've hurt me. The music also seems to have crossed its own line. Pop Art's songs always had a pervasive stiffness to them, as if the music had been derived so closely from the lyrics that it never quite took on its own life, as if the band was a juggler's illusion held up by David's voice, forever on the brink of clattering to the stage if he ran out of words. This kept the songs' lyrics always in sharp focus, and made his precise observations that much more cutting. Monkey in the Middle finds Steinhart at the helm of a new incarnation of SBH, Jeff's bass part taken by Cindy Albon, drummer Steve LePatner replaced by John Glogovac, and Lyn Norton's organ demoted from band to guest. Perhaps inspired by this trio format, David has turned up the distortion on his guitar, a circuit that in Pop Art days almost never felt current, and this is by far his rawest, loudest, and most energetic album. Therein, though, lies some of my regret. I have no shortage of raw, loud, energetic albums. New ones come out every week, many of them excellent. But as much as I like rawness, volume and energy, they are not the extent of rock, and every time a band with a unique style of their own relinquishes it, I feel like I've lost something. It seems worryingly like all of rock is converging. Metallica makes raw, loud rock records, Rush makes raw, loud rock records, the Posies make raw, loud rock records. Who are taking their places? Who will play byzantine heavy metal, or convoluted prog, or breathless pop? Who will play the sort of quiet, composed, uncluttered pop music that Smart Brown Handbag used to play, now that they don't? I don't think anybody will, and I miss it. Even more importantly, though, however distorted and fierce (by Steinhart's standards, at least) this album's music is, distorted and fierce are two things that David's stories exactly never were. His music, like his storytelling, was always painstakingly clear, and the musical clarity of his songs made them easier to take lyrically, because the coherency of the song vouched for the state of the narrator's mind even when the story itself left it in doubt. And so when these songs, in particular, resort to the obfuscation of rock bluster, it feels disturbingly like a flinch, and I start to wonder whether we all aren't miserable after all.
The War Against Silence

reviews

Please log in to review this album.

email

Please log in to email this artist.