PJ Bond – You Didn’t Know I Was Alphabetical – Album Review

PJ Bond is the kind of guy who absolutely rules open mic sessions. The guy who could play for 6 hours without repeating a song, if only the owner let him. The kind of guy who plays 14 songs you’ve never heard before and all of which you love, but you don’t want to tell him you like it for fear of not recognizing something classic by someone important. The kind of guy who has developed such a studied appreciation of so many different artists and styles that even when the song is an original, it feels like it has a piece of something else in it, even if that piece is only barely and ephemerally discernible.

This quality is Jersey-based Bond’s greatest strength as a solo artist, and also perhaps his biggest challenge to surmount. I’ve spent many hours now listening to his recent album, You Didn’t Know I Was Alphabetical,  on repeat and in the background as I’ve worked on this project or that. A hook will strike my fancy and the volume will go up, the phone will ring and it goes back down until my dogs fall asleep and I realize how quiet it is without them scampering around behind me and the increase volume key gets tapped a few more times. Over and over this pattern and others like it have played out, with the occasional smile here or re-started track there. After who knows how many days of this, I have a track listing to my right with checkmarks and margin scribbles, and a notepad on my left where I’ve jotted down random thoughts about Bond’s work.

Looking over those thoughts, though, I realize just how often Bond reminds me of someone else. “No Theme Summer (Pastro, PA)” sounds like a latter-day Wilco upbeat giddy retro rocker – you’ll probably be able to imagine a Tweedy version without much effort – while “Fucking! Viv” somehow had me dialing a friend, who had, unfortunately, already gone to bed, to ask what that song was when we were in high school in the mid-90s where the alt-rock ballad was accompanied by a video about missing kids. Turns out it was “Runaway Train” by Soul Asylum, and my friend nonplussed and displeased. There’s even a song on the first half of the record (“Grow Your Smile Wide”) where I feel like I’m listening to a song that was born out of an Aerosmith fake book turned to Livin’ on the Edge.”

This isn’t to say that the music isn’t good. Even if the aforementioned examples aren’t likely to get many indie rock enthusiasts these days excited, the songs on this record are solid, digable, and frequently impressive.  For example, the album opener, “You Too,” takes me back to the last time I saw Paleface play a small bar and I love “You Know the Drill” even though it sounds like it might’ve originally been written by Billy Joel with an assist Randy Newman but for an acoustic singer-songwriter type. Moreover, the songs where the influential debts aren’t so obvious (i.e., “The Night of the 27th,” “Skin and Bones”) are among the best on the album.

Instead, I think the perceived lack of originality, even in the face of what I’d bet is tremendously original, is more due to the sonic limitations of the singer-songwriter approach. When a performer is effectively naked in front of the crowd, with only the mic stand to hide behind and his own guitar to keep rhthym, there are only so many different combinations of chord changes and song structures that can fit into that genre. And, well, singer-songwriters have been doing it for quite some time, and darn near everything to write has been written and every way to sing has been sung, so there’s just gotta be some carryover. What I’d love to see (or, rather, hear) is Bond to get a band, write music with a fuller and more diverse sound, and see what he can do wants he frees himself of the confines of his current genre. Until then, though, You Didn’t Know I Was Alphabetical remains a highly listenable album. Especially if, unlike me, you are young enough not to have memories of The Gin Blossoms.

You Didn’t Know I Was Alphabetical, PJ Bond’s first solo album to be released by a label, dropped November 10th via Black Numbers. You can purchase it here. Interested readers should also be sure to check out Bond’s blog, Year of A Thousand Roommates, which chronicles the songwriter’s experiment in functional homelessness as he travels the country playing music and crashing on a different couch every night. By my count, he’s been doing this mid-April, so he ought to be up to like 750 or so roommates so far. Check it out!

PJ Bond – Skin and Bones

PJ Bond – You, too