David P. Smith "Striving For A New Tomorrow" (Northern Electric 2006)

Hilarious drunken escapades of Canadian accordion player

Rivalling Richard Thompson for ‘worst album cover of the year,’ David P. Smith’s ‘Striving for a New Tomorrow,’ couldn’t have selected a more unappealing image to advertise this record. Yet the cheesy image of Smith in cabaret jacket and bowtie shouldn’t deter listeners from this hilarious collection of woozy drinking ballads. Sounding a little like Cracker, but with lyrics penned by Tom Waits, Smith demands attention with stomping and irregular beats and bizarre lyrics. Whether describing being legless in Montana on “ pissy American beer” and seeing “grotesque naked men with good-old American know-how sucking on the teat of a dying golden sow,” or knowing the lady in the obituary section who “looked kinda like a lizard,” Smith’s lyrics engage the listener in such a way that this belching accordion shanty music sounds downright catchy. Smith is on a mission, according to his press release, to rise up against “the school-bus full of unpleasant snots who cynically revel in ‘showing’ their misguided audiences every stripe of perversion or cruelty in the name of ‘art.’

Take ‘Teen-age Drinking Song,’ which finds the “acne-bitten, fuzzy-headed, liquor-sodden,’ narrator who observes a ‘major babe’ at the high-school dance with “her head between her hands, the fabric of her dress stretched between her knees formed a small basin containing the contents of her stomach.” Sounds like my home town! ‘Worst Job,’ the flagship song on the record, which opines; “the worst job I ever had, was eating shit out of a bucket. The second worst job I ever had, I used my face as a shovel.” Often nonsensical, these lyrics still raise a chuckle and should appeal to fans of nonsense-mongers from The Handsome Family to They Might Be Giants. The stand-out track is ‘Holy Pies’ which wouldn’t sound of place if Tom Waits had stuck it on Blood Money. That’s high praise, but Smith carries this bizarre tale of ‘holy pies falling from the sky’ off with strangled intensity, descending horns and heavy rhythms creating an unnerving ambience.

Similar to some of the Pogues early work, Smith manages to capture the sound of drunken reverie whether in upbeat zydeco numbers or in downbeat maudlin tales of alcoholism. This is a great record, well worth chasing down if you are a fan of Frank’s Wild Years or Countrysides, but the good work is undone by an unnecessary 24 minute ‘hidden’ track. Emerging from a din of audience chatter, Smith can be heard performing an oompah ode to Germany consisting of “Hats off to Germany, sausages and beer.” However, listening to Smith wander home in the rain, singing to himself, for the next fifteen minutes is agitating, and although the idea may have worked on paper given the subject matter of the record, it is a tedious exercise.

Date review added:  Friday, April 07, 2006
Reviewer:  Nic Fildes
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Related web link:  Label Web site