It has been four years since the last time John Mendelssohn gave his fanbase anything to celebrate and in the interim he seems to have gotten further and deeper into
1. Design
And
2. Writing about travel.
Both activities fitting enough for John’s somewhere between sarcastic and wounded persona if not his real life personality replete with children and ex-wives; his voice, his literate Facebook voice, is contrarian and aggressive and his musical voice a super arranged pop sound.
Today I got a new Mendelsohn, the brilliant named “Patti Armageddon” which starts with an oom pah pah before evolving into an off base tunefulness and a psychedelic calliope of sound whirling round John’s self-abasement and regret.
John said this about “Patti Armageddon”: “An expression of contrition to an old girlfriend to whom I was awful, you see.” Than John, less than helpfully, quotes from the song itself: “i marvel to realize at her most gorgeous she loved me. I’ll grant you that was hardly fair, but neither was my childhood.
The song itself doesn’t have the softness of nostalgia, or memory, it is too strange; you expect something beautiful but maybe as a direct reflection of John’s sense of guilt at his actions to the woman, the song is unforgiving. It puts you off, and, if all you knew from John was this song, you might believe that he is a twisted self-analytic deep in the troughs of construction, academic knowitall.
But since this just one of many, it feels more as though he is making a sort of musical penance and is being left in a whirligig of incriminating sound.
Should be available soon enough since it sounds about complete to these ears.
Grade: A
