WARREN ZEVON - Sentimental Hygiene (1987)

Warren Zevon's career is one of those that had a bunch of "comebacks," "returns to form," etc.  That's what happens when you peak... well, early-ish.  As chronicled, he'd certainly paid his dues and spent a decade bumming around the music business before hitting it big with the self-titled and then Excitable Boy.  Yet I seriously wanted just now to call them "the first two albums," despite knowing full well that they weren't.  Point is, he hit his commercial and to some artistic peak very soon after people started having heard of him at all, and then within a couple years his career was on the downswing.  And so, like artists who peak early, fans of each record would inevitably hail it as a return to form.  After The Envoy flopped, Sentimental Hygiene was the first of a series of mini-comebacks.  You've got Zevon newly sober and getting back in touch with his roots, you've got the promising pairing with a little band called R.E.M., a quirky indie darling at the time.  So, will old Warren reign in the excess and hit us with a masterpiece?

Track One:  "Sentimental Hygiene"

Any thought that Sentimental Hygiene will be a natural sounding lo-fi record go out the window as the record chooses to introduce itself with an overpowering keyboard figure.  We are, sadly, still in the throes of the '80s.  I wouldn't necessarily say that's a bad thing in and of itself, except, uh, actually I kinda do.  My brain knows that, obviously, every arbitrary period of time in music has its ups and downs.  My heart does not like the '80s.  The music that most embodies an alleged "'80s" sound is soulless, full of itself, and artificial.  That is a combination that does not play to Zevon's strengths.

Maybe deliberately, "Sentimental Hygiene" (the song) sounds tired.  The performance is resigned.  The lyrics are meandering.  The alleged chorus is just saying the title, and, well, those are certainly words, but combining two words without context doesn't instantly turn something into an expression that means somnething.  There are attempts to liven up the proceedings like the screamy-sounding guitar parts, but they're swallowed up by that pulsating keyboard part playing over and over and over and over.

Despite all the above whinging, I've been getting SH stuck in my head quite a bit.  Such a simple hook is hard to forget.  It is a hook, even if five minutes of it as a bit much.  So, while SH may not be a great song - and I don't think that it's great - it certainly is a catchy song.  Counts for something.

Track Two:  "Boom Boom Mancini"

Always enjoyed this one.  Even with the odd chorus - only a few people in the world would rhyme "hurry on home" with "...fighting Bobby Chacon."  Something about the pulsating baseline offset with the piano counterpoint fits nicely with one of Zevon's classic character profiles of a tough guy, romanticizing the violence inherent in the system even when it leads to consequences like the individual boxers getting blamed when, shall we say, things go very wrong.  Solid piece of storytelling.

Track Three:  "The Factory"

More working-joe blues from Zevon, and another legitimately lively number coming after "Boom Boom Mancini."  This one has grown on me quite a bit over the course of spending time with the record.  Zevon has a way of spinning a tale with subtle shifts as it goes on.  At first this is another one where every line ends with the same phrase and one questions how much this nebbishy looking professional fuckup knows about factory work.  Somewhere along the line I just got hooked and want to keep listening.   I'm not quite sure why I like the "yes, sir!  No, sir!" hook so much except that it kicks up the song a notch and doesn't get repeated often enough to get annoying.  I think the panache of the lyrics is what sold me.  The narrator manages to remain a dogged worker, head down as a matter of principle, and that doesn't change whilst he still gradually reveals the messier side of this walk of life into which he's stumbled.  The union and the benefits are good, but the line about disability suddenly turns a story that started with a little job at the factory into a story about generational trauma.  And then that closing stanza, I've gone from thinking it was too repetitious to loving the wordplay and the way Zevon uses his voice to bring fire to:

Kickin' ass-bestos in the factory
Punchin' out Chryslers in the factory
Breathin' that plastic in the factory
Makin' polyvinyl chloride in the factory!

Track Four:  "Trouble Waiting To Happen"

Damn, do I need an actual chorus instead of a single phrase repeated over and over.  Yeah, nothing special for me here.  Song is decent.  I should extoll it being so piano driven, but I'm not going to remember the piano part ten minutes from now.  The lyrical conceit ought to be worth unpacking on paper, but I'm not feeling it.

Track Five:  "Reconsider Me"

We're hearing Zevon get old here, and "Reconsider Me" is an aged-singer song in a good way - less gloss, more music.  I hope it comes through in these bits of writing, but when he's "on," I admire Zevon's ability to use plainspoken straightforward language to say something beautiful.  I keep wanting to find some irony in the guy's frequent paens to old lovers and endless promises to change, but songs of this ilk coming from Zevon do tend to be nakedly sentimental.  Probably his best performance on the record as a singer, fitting his voice perfectly to the melody.  Gorgeous legato guitar work and harmonies from what sounds like it really ought to be Peter Buck and company (credits say that they're not on this one).

On the meta side, well, the people asking to be reconsidered aren't always capable of the sort of change they're promising.  Obviously in Zevon's case, he did stop drinking and hitting people; he didn't lose his total inability to commit to a relationship.  Some things change.  Some don't.

You can go and be what you want to be
And it'll be alright if we disagree

I believe that the narrator believes that, at least in the moment...

Track Six:  "Detox Mansion"

OK, the R.E.M. guys are definitely on this one - this is what they sound like when they're in "big dumb rock song" mode*.  I blow hot and cold on "Detox Mansion."  I've always wanted to love it because, well, the song rocks.  I've often not quite gotten there; I think it could use one more hook, and my mind wanders just enough sometimes to get annoyed at how the lyrics think they're cleverer than they are.  I don't need any more songs in my life about celebrities satirizing some aspect of celebrity culture.  Second to most recent listen, I was mentally composing an entry describing the song as something that can't quite hit what's it's aiming more.  This very most recent listen, I found myself really digging the muscianship, especially the bridge and the outro.  Seriously, I really enjoy the track roughly 50% of the time.  Let's call it a win.

 

Track Seven:  "Bad Karma"

I think it says something that on both of my most recent listens, I was thinking by about 1:15 in "this song has to be almost over, right?"

Damn, do I need an actual chorus instead of a single phrase repeated over and over.  "Bad Karma" is also yet another in a line of self-portraits of self-mythologized sad sacks.  Sometimes they bring it on themselves, sometimes luck itself is against them, but half of Zevon's characters jauntily refuse to ever shut up about how bad they've got it in all walks of life.  We've heard Zevon go down this basic road multiple times before, including on this record.  We get it.

I suppose this song's not bad either.  I think it's really the vocals that let it down some, since instrumentally we're really getting the full R.E.M. here.  If you believe that "jangle pop" is an actual thing, well, BK jangles (and Michael Stipe himself deigns to make an appearance).  There are some literal bells and whistles thrown in from the instrumentation to keep things a bit interesting.

Track Eight:  "Even A Dog Can Shake Hands"

Here's another jangly rocker (but with an almost Beach Boys cadence) that tries to wring still more material out of the L.A. celebrity scene.  Everyone's using everyone, just like in every other song ever written about the topic since the dawn of time.  What this sounds like to me is a song trying and failing to match the energy of Zevon's highest energy and most incisive pieces from his not-actually-that-long-ago prime.  It's anxious to let you know how energized it is and how much fun it's having.  The effect is more to sound tired.  At least the almost spoken-word thing on the "sign page forty-two" bridge works pretty well, like a lesser "The Factory" outro.

Track Nine:  "The Heartache"

I wish "The Heartache" clicked a little more for me.  It's true that there's solid key work that splits the difference between a Warren Zevon sound and a Mike Mills sound.  (This is one of the songs that goes more organic and less layers, and I have to appreciate that.)  It's true that the lyrics take a rather neat tack here, using classic Zevonian plain talk to convey the premise that heartache is a fundamental risk of love/being human.  This is the sort of song that has the ingredients on paper to make me love it and... I do like it, but pretty far from a classic; simply does not come together in that magical way for me.  I gotta tell you, the record is sounding pretty tired by this point.

 

Track Ten:  "Leave My Monkey Alone"

Heh, this is fun!  Repetitious beyond belief, but when you're legitimately funky enough, you can make that work.  Ah, okay, George Clinton produced the song.  That'll do it.

I have no idea what the monkey is that needs to be left alone, or what it has to do with Kenyan independence and/or the fall of the Empire, but the song sounds so danceable, no matter how slow or morose it may be.  Hell, I even appreciate the bass work of Flea here, divorced from his eventual main gig in one of my least favorite bands in history.**

Overall thoughts:

The thing I keep brushing against is that Sentimental Hygiene brushes against the edges of being great.  We're starting to see signs of sober late-period Zevon here, but he's still doing the big glossy productions, leaving the effect of it sounding bad-tired rather than good-tired, at least for me.  I think Sentimental Hygiene is a step up from The Envoy in terms of overall consistency, with the lesser songs not being bad or anything.  I'm not sure if the highs are even as high as on that record, though, and I'm surprised to find myself writing that I think I actually like Hygiene less than The Envoy.  And pretty obviously a far cry from the highs of Bad Luck Streak.  This is a record I want to like more than I do.

 

Damn, do I need an actual chorus instead of a single phrase repeated over and over.

Favorite track:  "The Factory"

Runner up:  "Reconsider Me"

Least favorite track:  "Even A Dog Can Shake Hands"

Rating:  3/5

Chronologically it'd make sense to do Hindu Love Gods next.  As much as I dislike cover records where I don't know the originals, it contains that song, so I think I have to write about the record.  So, whenever I get around to it!

Definitive list of records by Warren Zevon profiled so far, in order of what I have decided is unambiguously their quality

1)  Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School

2)  Excitable Boy

3)  Warren Zevon

4)  The Envoy

5)  Sentimental Hygiene 

6)  Wanted Dead Or Alive

*See also:  "Stand," "The Wake-Up Bomb"

**You know how everyone has those one or two artists who just trigger a disproportionate antipathy?  Maybe you even used to like some of their stuff, and then one day you were just done?  Red Hot Chili Peppers are one of those groups for me.  If by some incredible miracle I were to never hear any of their songs again for as long as I live, it'd still be way, way, too soon.