Clem Snide
Indie Rock / Alternative
Eef Barzelay (vocals, guitar)
Pete Fitzpatrick (guitar, banjo, euphonium, backing vocals)
Brendan Fitzpatrick (bass, keyboards, backing vocals)
Ben Martin (drums)
At various points since its inception in 1991, Clem Snide has played gently winsome country music accompanied by a cello, noisy rock punctuated with a squawking saxophone, and sincere love ballads incorporating strings, horns, glockenspiels, and more. Bandleader Eef Barzelay has written songs about love, death, faith, fashion, and pop-cultural detritus—often simultaneously—with wry warmth and wordplay that never stoops to cleverness for cleverness’ sake. Five albums into a career that’s combined uncommon versatility with reassuring consistency, Barzelay and his bandmates return with End Of Love, an album that combines all of their best tendencies, mixing empathy and wit, rock and country, and keen insights on matters great and small.
“I wrote most of the songs for End Of Love while knee-deep in dark and slippery emotional goo,” Barzelay says. “It was a difficult, frustrating time: My mom was dying of cancer, my wife’s mom had just died, I was moving my family from Brooklyn to Nashville, and I had no money. I wrote many of the songs in my head while touring in the van, and with so much chaos going on at once, the words just seemed to pour right out. For me, this record is about failing triumphantly.”
Not that triumph hasn’t often greeted Clem Snide, which followed an ill-fated major-label deal early in its career with a string of remarkable successes. “Moment In The Sun,” from 2001’s The Ghost Of Fashion, replaced a Foo Fighters song as the theme for the NBC TV series Ed. The band has appeared on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn, and NPR’s All Things Considered, and toured with Ben Folds throughout the U.S. and Europe. And Clem Snide surfaced on several of 2004’s most prominent and popular compilation CDs, including The Late Great Daniel Johnston and the McSweeney’s/MoveOn.org benefit Future Soundtrack For America.
Recorded in both Nashville (with Lambchop producer-engineer Mark Nevers) and Brooklyn (with Pavement and Ramones producer Bryce Goggin), with Barzelay producing for the first time in his career, End Of Love sounds appropriately confident, lending nuance and texture to a diverse array of songs which blend darkness and light. “Jews For Jesus Blues” finds the point where religion and regret collide, while “Made For TV Movie” uses a Lucille Ball biopic as the catalyst for a meditation on long-term happiness. From jagged indie-rock (“End Of Love”) and spangly pop (“Fill Me With Your Light”) to the more epic and elegant likes of “When We Become,” the album courses through come-ons and coming-of-age stories with equal skill and depth.
Now armed with his own studio space in Nashville (Clem Snide’s members are split evenly between Nashville and Brooklyn, where multi-instrumentalist Pete Fitzpatrick and his bassist cousin Brendan Fitzpatrick remain), Barzelay seems more comfortable than ever turning chaos into chemistry. “If Ghost Of Fashion was a thesis, and Soft Spot was its antithesis, then End Of Love is synthesis,” he says. “I like to imagine this record playing in the background as a red state and a blue state—maybe Tennessee and New York—secretly meet at a Comfort Inn off I-40 and have angry, awkward sex.”
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