Strange how this one sits in amongst the other CDs very much like the same awkward orphan exiled from Tim Burton's island of broken toys it effects to be in half of the songs. I dig it out every once in a while but it still sounds the same, sort of.
As I recall, back in 1996, I'd spent a couple of years drifting away from whatever was going on in music due to the temporary extinction of vinyl. Then my friend Eddy gave me his old CD player in the hope of getting me to shut up about it, and I found myself buying compact discs with only vague clues as to what I was buying, and from places like Woolworths. I'd heard Susan's House on the radio and wasn't convinced, but they'd been on telly playing Novocaine for the Soul and it had sounded pretty decent.
In many ways Beautiful Freak is flawless, a perfect album. It does everything it sets out to do and does it well. It's well recorded. You can hear everything, and it has an interesting dynamic balancing sampled rhythms against double bass, electric piano and so on; and I want to love the thing, but somehow it just doesn't ever quite get there. The entire enterprise feels too easy, too obvious.
It feels different in 2020 to how it did in 1996 being that I now live in Americaland and recognise the actual grinding small town poverty rather than just the general sense of misery, but nearly a quarter century later it still feels approximately like Steven Spielberg's version of Nirvana, a sonic counterpart to all those meticulously trashy urban living rooms of Close Encounters and the rest. Musically it's Americana via the Velvet Underground given the inevitable trip-hop production of the time with the shuffling percussion and everything, and lyrically it would be fine except for trying just a little too hard here and there. The title track, My Beloved Monster and Spunky may as well be a teenager trying to freak us out with drawings of scary clowns and sound like they were imagineered to be played over the closing credits of Tim Burton movies. The seemingly endless juxtaposition of cute, folksy and weird becomes exhausting after a while.
Nevertheless, just like the sad puppy it aspires to be, it's somehow difficult to resent the thing. It's fucking catchy and even when it's pushing the existentialist Buffy buttons, it either doesn't realise it's doing it or is doing the best it can, having no other avenue of expression, and I definitely remember having days which felt like Novocaine for the Soul. Steve Albini might have been able to save it from itself, but never mind.
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