Search - Aimee Mann :: Whatever

Sometime After (til) Tuesday

Tim Brough | Springfield, PA United States | 10/06/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Aimee Mann seemed to slowly push the new wave origins of Til Tuesday deeper into arty and moody beauties, with the gorgeousness of Welcome Home recalling Roxy Music's Avalon and then the devastating personal Everything's Different Now chronicling her breakup with Jules Shear with the alacrity of Elvis Costello or Squeeze. (And was essentially a solo album with a little help from her friends.)



As seemed to become standard with Aimee's career, six years of legal problems with Epic over Til Tuesday stalled this album from coming out on Imago till 1993, who then filed for bankruptcy and tied Aimee down until Geffen undid the legal knots and re-released it. That is a good thing, because this is the heaviest rocking that Aimee ever did. As her albums increasingly became musically more complex and introspective, the electricity seeped out from her recordings even as the quality remained impeccable. So you can delight in the wild guitar leads in "I Should Have Known" but hear the sad loss of a friendship via the colors that become more dominant in her career on "4th of July:"



"But now here I am and the world's gotten colder,

and she has the river down which I sold her."



There are also plenty of lyrics that chart Aimee's literary proclivities. After all, how many singers reference Dickens for a song ("Jacob Marley's Chain)? The initial single, "Stupid Thing," was a Beatlesque concoction that derived its downcast shimmer from "Abbey Road." The production throughout this CD is elaborate, with longtime cohort Jon Brion ornately dressing everything here. While Mann did drift towards a more personal style and sound (around the time of Bachelor No. 2), her first round of solo recording is still an album I pull out for pleasures from time to time, and stands up with albums of the period from Crowded House, Elvis Costello and 10,000 Maniacs."