When Clem Snide began recording albums more than a decade ago in New York, the band’s clever alt-country songs often came across as an ironic take on Americana. Everyone knows you can’t do country music in the big city, and where did Israeli-born singer/guitarist Eef Barzelay get that twang from, anyway? After years of slogging through the indie-rock touring circuit, a band breakup and a move to Nashville, the reunited Clem Snide has earned the all-American desperation and heartbreak that lies in the marrow of its latest album, The Meat Of Life, out this week on 429 Records. Barzelay is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Barzelay: This is such a wonderfully fucked-up version of this great song. The production is so strange; there’s a bowed bass that sounds like they just forgot to mute it, and then somebody’s creaking around all over the place. Every time I go to make a record, I secretly hope it comes out like Big Star‘s Sister Lovers. It was their last record and swings wildly with desperate ambition in the face of substantial public indifference. Read more about Big Star.
“Nature Boy”:
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/NatureBoy.mp3
