wears the trousers magazine

@#%&*! Smilers
Aimee Mann •••½
SuperEgo 

Following the unexpected detour of her Christmas album One More Drifter In The Snow, it’s pretty much back to business as usual at Mann Towers. From the opening bars of opener ‘Freeway’ – a sketch of a Californian druggie – @#%&*! Smilers, her seventh studio recording, is immediately identifiable as an Aimee Mann album, a fact which has both its positive and negative aspects. For despite her claims that the replacing of guitars with keyboards on this new work has resulted in a “musically rich” album distinct from her previous efforts, it’s possible to suggest that this record actually finds Mann stuck in something of a creative cul-de-sac. Song by song @#%&*! Smilers is well-crafted, melodic, literate, witty and catchy as hell. But it’s also, overall, rather familiar and, at times, ever so slightly dull.

The main problem – one common to her most recent releases – is the consistency of the album’s energy level: measured, muted and mid-tempo, the songs tend to lack the emotional peaks and troughs that characterised her earlier work. A similar problem could be identified with Mann’s vocals, which, engaging and appealing as they undoubtedly are, only rarely rouse themselves beyond the twin poles of weary resignation or dry irony. But while no amount of strings or synthesizers can entirely disguise the fact that it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell her albums apart, Mann’s impeccable way with a hook and a lyric remains undiminished, which is more than enough reason to make @#%&*! Smilers worthy of your time, despite its undeniable sense of déjà vu.

Following the ineffably infectious first single ‘Freeway’ the album offers us the odd, brief ‘Stranger Into Starman’, the elegant ‘Looking For Nothing’, the wry, rueful ‘Phoenix’ and the deceptively jaunty, brass-inflected ‘Borrowing Time’, before hitting its stride with the lovely ‘It’s Over’, the pre-midlife crisis skewering ‘31 Today’ and ‘The Great Beyond’, which urges escape from a town in which “every win is the beginning of defeat’.” The second half of the album then finds Mann in collaborative mode: ‘True Believer’ is a co-write with Grant Lee Phillips, ‘Little Tornado’ boasts whistling from ‘A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius’ author and McSweeneys editor Dave Eggers, and the closing ‘Ballantines’ finds her trading verses with Sean Hayes. While these later tracks don’t rank as Mann classics, a few listens in they do begin to develop individual personalities and a few lyrical gems emerge.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of many other songwriters who could smuggle lines such as “I thought my life would be better by now / but it’s not and I don’t know where to turn” into the sprightliest of pop songs. For this reason alone Mann remains one of contemporary pop’s greatest (and most underrated) craftswomen, a distinctive performer whose music marries memorable melodies to perceptive, witty and sometimes acutely painful emotional insights. Nonetheless, the lack of stylistic development across her albums means that her work is in danger of becoming too safe and predictable. It’s this quality of repetition that ultimately makes @#%&*! Smilers an album that inspires the cool admiration of Lost In Space or The Forgotten Arm rather than the sustained exhilaration of Whatever or Bachelor No 2.

Alex Ramon
UK release date: 02/06/08