Hardscrabble primer of relationship hell
In David Gedge’s City of Angels, the chicks with wings tend to lead you to bad decisions or cliffdrop jiltings. Dumped abruptly by a lover in “Palisades,” the narrator tries to cherrypick his friend’s gal in “The Thing That I Like Best About Him Is His Girlfriend,” volunteers himself as a too earnest one night stand in “Don’t Take Me Home Until I’m Drunk,” and mentally cheats on his wife in “The Trouble With Men.” Matching the Morrisseyesque titles is a dry wit, punchily captured on “Soup,” which borrows the Seinfeld trope as a couple plays hard to get and harder to keep. Lyrically barbed and lucid, the album is a good book, but sonically, Steve Albini’s dry production is kind to guitars and harsher on Gedge’s heavily-accented warble. As such, El is the kind of album you listen to once—and appreciate—but never really groove through with any regularity.