Better Than Ezra

How Does Your Garden Grow? (Elektra)
by Jamie Kiffel

With its computationally-timed harmonic blurs, steel sieve-shredded megaphone vocals and instrumentally-enhanced philosophical prattle, Better Than Ezra‘s How Does Your Garden Grow? plays like a trendy math-induced drug trip, with every hallucination graphed and tallied to the last decimal point. The computations are completed so seamlessly, with the assistance of moonglow Moog organ tones, steel drums, and intermittent space station meeps and bloops, that the mind-spinning quality of the record is not compromised at the cost of its appreciably exhaustive forethought.

Lyrics are strange and evocative without overstepping the boundary of pretension, as in disarming choruses like “One more murder in this town,” which succeed with an air of jazz scat rather than over-thought, under-expressive metaphor. Salsa rhythms set over speech suggest an overwound city street party in “I Like It Like That;” “Alison Foley,” with its raw-wound guitar and stretched diphthongs, exudes an unmistakable aura of early Stones. The record refuses to linger too long on any single style, spinning from psychotrope to meditative musical montage, from brilliant electric brain impulses to blue-purple aural tears; from Sid Vicious-flavored yelps (in “Live Again”) to self-conscious nods to the mind-reeling backflips the album encourages, with lines like “Are you lucid? Drug induc-ed?” in “Happy Day MaMa.” Much of the disc exudes a sense of history anachronistic to its young vocalist: an old-souled pathos inherited from an ancestry of dark-hued introspection.

The tracks sidestep the wide laser cut of monotony, splicing the recording among impenetrable mystic tunes and aural blips as bright as consumer culture distorted by a creative brain. The noises here are carefully construed for maximal-percentage brain penetration; enjoy the effects of well-programmed psychic disturbance.
(75 Rockefeller Plaza New York, NY 10019)