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April 7 - 14, 2000

[Music Reviews]

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**** 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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