**** Pedro the Lion
WINNERS NEVER QUIT
(Jade Tree)
David Bazan is an
exotic, reclusive presence in indie rock -- born of Seattle hardcore (he shared
a band with Damien Jurado), he has quietly toured his band Pedro the Lion to
both secular all-ages punk crowds and the burgeoning Christian youth circuit.
Bazan is clearly a man of complicated faith -- too complicated for dogmatic
consumption, as becomes apparent on his second album, Winners Never
Quit. "A good person," reads the prologue in the liner notes, "is some one
[sic] who hasn't been caught."
The disc begins with a drowsy hymn, Bazan's voice blurry and heavy-lidded, as
if trying to shake off sleep. On "Slow and Steady Wins the Race," as in Robert
Frost, two paths diverge in a wood; here, though, the well-traveled one leads
to a warm safe place and eventually to Heaven, the other to snakebites, poison
oak, and certain doom. But what begins as a graceful affirmation of the
righteous path soon darkens into a grim parable of compromised redemption. By
the fourth song one murder has taken place -- tastefully off stage, though
easily inferred -- and another appears inevitable. There's a touch of wry humor
in the perversely upbeat "Never Leave a Job Half Done," one of a handful of
songs on which Bazan shifts gears into an infectious mid-tempo gait. And the
album's haunting final verses likely guarantee that Bazan will never get
another church gig. But Winners Never Quit goes beyond a repudiation of
any specific faith. Bazan unmasks an insidious poetry of the violence, shame,
and self-loathing that lurk at the heart of the American dream -- a pervasive
and suffocating high holy terror born of the compulsion to succeed.
-- Carly Carioli
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