5 out of 5

Label: Grass

Producer: Eli Janney

‘Bonsai Superstar’ is one of the few truly perfect albums that I own.  Barkmarket can certainly get a little yelly and each album has its sorta’ shruggy tracks, and Paper Chase reek of emo from afar, so maybe I’d succumb to a sheepish grin when rockin’ either of those albums out of my… Zune… speakers…? when ear hustlers walk on by, but ‘Bonsai’ is just plain freckin’ cool, and I can’t fathom otherwise.  I accept that ‘Hissing Prigs’ might be the more critic friendly choice for Best Brainiac Disc, but while I certainly wish Mr. Taylor hadn’t been taken from us to see where the band would’ve gone, I admit that ‘Prigs’ was a herald of the electro-punk mostly shit era that I didn’t dig on.  I much preferred the noise punk that emerged on this album.

But digressing and all.  There isn’t a moment on this thing I don’t enjoy – the two ‘instrumental’ noise tracks flutter just at the edges of songness to be interesting and are timed just right as segues.  From the creepy quiet moments to the explosions of ‘Status: Choke,’ its a quick listen at 30 minutes, but never unexciting.  Rather, each step is exacting – Eli Janney’s production, elsewhere, has proven muffly, but matched against the group’s new sense clarity in their approach (previous ‘Smack Bunny Baby’ was grungey sloppy), it equals such an awesome step up in fidelity, everything with everything just as sharp as it needs to be to make its point, without the shrill keys or distortion or feedback or vocal manipulation becoming annoyances instead of well-applied nuances.  The sound is so key – again, jumping forward to ‘Hissing Prigs,’ where sometimes the sound trickery would get sort of numbing – that its tough to extricate the song-writing from the work done in the studio in terms of what is the primary contribution which makes this so relistenable.

Taylor’s lyrics are weird, undoubtedly, but avoid dropping into cringe-worthy silliness, tossing out imagery that disgusts or titillates as desired, and his mastery of his vocals (or comfort / skill with modulating them) allows the group to truly use Voice as another instrument.  And sure, I’ll credit a lot of this awesomeness to John Schmersal.  He brought the same range of oddities to his John Stuart Mill project and Enon before he got all Yoko’d on us.

I’m grabbing at different straws to say the thing thing: rare is the disc you can put on any time, any mood.  ‘Bonsai Superstar’ is one of those.  It caught a flash of balanced energy from the band; one which is sorely missed.  But at least we got this album out of it.