There's lots that I could talk about regarding Justin Moyer's Edie Sedgwick incarnation. It's high concept to the point of making your head hurt. Sedgwick's amusingly confusing website manifesto works within the same anti-trend/anti-anti-trend schema that more than enough indie "collectives" and the like have undertaken. It seems, at its heart, Sedgwick wishes to celebrate the vacuity signifiers. The song lyrics are a kind of celebrity worship, but not the gossipy kind. More the sort of open-ended iconography that engages with whatever the screenwriter of Aliens wanted to present Sigourney Weaver versus how she is distilled through the viewers relative relationship to the screen image. Or something like that.
I could talk about how fascinating this sort of mainstream subversion is, but we're dealing with a compact disc here. Audio data. And what of it? Shit, man, sounds pretty chinsy to me. Granted, I'm so out of this dancepunk/electro thing that I can't even categorize this artist right, so once again, Mr. Aspiringwriter Jr. has failed miserably to capture any sort of objectivity.
This music is dippy and irritatingly basic drum machine rhythm-dependent. The voice is impassioned but flat and without any kind of range. The times when Her Love Is Real sounds the least electro just wind up sounding like electro with some guitar tossed on top. There's some intriguing speaking intrusions on "Harrison Ford" that throw you off refreshingly, but it's really overall a lackluster affair. Whereas Mu took this sort of music and truly punked it the fuck out, Sedgwick uses it in such a rote fashion that I'm inclined to cut this review short.
Judging from Pitchfork's positive rating, perhaps this album and I are a bad match. But to pretend I cared all that much what Sedgwick was going on about would be doing a lot of music lovers out there a disservice. If you're one of those people who for some reason thinks that the smirky, call-to-noodle-arms plod of Le Tigre is fascinating and/or fun, then this might be for you. I missed the boat on that shit, but I took extra time at the dockside newsstand to make sure that I did. So, yeah, I'm hating. Oh well.
Initially, looking at the website and press pack, Sedgwick seemed formidable and intriguing. The presentation has all the concept, attitude, and interesting philosophy to make for a thorough and engrossing review. If I were writing a website review, Edie Sedgwick would be rated in the upper range. But, since I'm not, the overall staleness and lackluster quality of this music (I suppose "Sally Field" is a somewhat engrossing post-rock ditty, though the singing drags it down), I can't hype something that is this musically infertile. The drum machine has come too far as an instrument to be some celebrity obsessed poet/drag queen's karaoke bar.
1. Martin Sheen
2. Christian Slater
3. Sigourney Weaver
4. Robert Downey Jr.
5. Lucy Liu
6. Molly Ringwald
7. Michael J. Fox
8. Arnold Schwarzenegger II
9. Tim Robbins
10. Harrison Ford
11. Tom Hanks II
12. Sally Field
13. Arnold Schwarzenegger I
14. Haley Joel Osment
More about: Edie Sedgwick
