Album Review: Mini Mansions – Guy Walks Into A Bar…


Guy Walks Into A Bar



As side projects go in a world of side projects, Mini Mansions remains one of those whose members have some of the best CVs: singer/bassist Michael Shulman is also of Queens Of The Stone Age, Tyler Parkford plays keys for the Arctic Monkeys and bass Zach Dawes moonlights either here or there in The Last Shadow Puppets.

That’s also quite a lot of collective reps to break out from under, but on Guy Walks Into A Bar… the trio – along with guest QOTSA drummer Jon Theodore – make their boldest attempt yet at hashing all of that out once and for all. A sort of concept album, it documents a romance Shuman had which blew up rapidly and then extinguished, fertile ground for most songwriters and one explored here with a fair amount of reflexivity.

Musically, the threesome are all about the pop-psychedelia of their West Coast home, although both opener Should Be Dancing and the louche GummyBear do, if listened to carefully, owe more than a little in delivery to Alex Turner and wouldn’t have been out of place on the Monkeys’ controversial, oddly kitsch last album.

As anyone who’s ridden on man’s oldest rollercoaster will know, the falling bit of falling in love is the closest thing possible to experiencing a nervous breakdown, a head-shrinking apoplexy channelled on the bulging-eyed synth pop of Bad Things (That Make You Feel Good) and Forgot Your Name, the latter sort of like what Hot Chip would sound like playing Sparks covers after taking something they found on a nightclub floor.

The trio once shared a stage with the brothers Mael, and if you liked that you’ll go wild for I’m In Love, an even more go ahead, no-punches-pulled glam fest on which Shulman sums the orientation up nicely with, ‘I get a feeling like I’m f*cked in the head/No need for therapy/Or bottles of meds’, proving that for him anyway taking yourself too seriously is another guy’s problem.

It’s easy in this flush to forget that this is supposed to be a break-up album, and the trauma when it inevitably arrives catches everyone almost unprepared; on the proudly rude duet with The Kills’ Alison Mosshart, Hey Lover, the chewy call and response dynamic still just sounds like drunken cooing, but then with a snap closer Tears In Her Eyes means it’s time up, guitars raking at last as the whole thing dissolves into an acidic, brittle climax.

Guy Walks Into A Bar… is meant to do that, to give the listener both the roses and razor’s edge, like a Valentines card from someone you’ve been seeing who uses it to break up with you. For three people who are meant to be bigger when they play in other bands it’s the boldest of moves, one which even if it falls short musically sometimes, confirms that have a living breathing box of surprises all their own with a future nobody should be able to predict.

7/10

(Andy Peterson)


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