This Is the Glamorous
Label: Beggar’s Banquet
Media: CD
Format: Album
WorkNameSort: This Is the Glamorous
Known as the ramshackle side project for Girls Against Boys guys Johnny Temple and Scott McCloud (and any other D.C. musician happening by), New Wet Kojak delivers a more cohesive effort this time out, both in theme and songwriting. Whereas earlier albums were mired in sparseness and ambiguity, “This Is the Glamorous” calls to mind the jazz-inflected grooves of Morphine, the rhythmic intuition of Soul Coughing and the critical insistence of Fugazi. Drawing its lyrical fodder from the cultural pyramid-schemes of “American Idol” and “Making the Band,” NWK dresses-down the Bacchanalian consumerism pervading our image-obsessed homoge-nation, and somehow makes it all danceable. “It’s in your cigarettes … your shampoo … in the eyes of everyone in style,” slithers McCloud on the title track, laundry-listing the must-have items and attitudes of the “wanna-be” beautiful. The tone of the record, while being far more tongue-in-cheek than anything Fugazi has ever recorded, projects an iconoclastic irony: “I just wanna be different, just like everybody else,” quips McCloud on “Something Easy.” Which begs the question: Why isn’t the record named “Who Loves You, Baby?”
This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2003.