Oh, good grief; another single from Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences. I’ve started to view them with a certain trepidation now – not because I don’t like them, but because I wonder what finding them strangely fascinating and contradictory says about me as a person. Somehow I doubt it means that I, too, am fascinating and contradictory - for if I were, I probably wouldn’t be a single man with a rock music reviews website for company. How appropriate, then, that “You Can’t Make Somebody Love You” should be about the perils of unrequited love.
This time out Thee Awkward Silences are locked into a Playschool glam-rock clap-along, complete with a cartoon melody played on a weird rinky-dink synthesizer. “You Can’t Make Somebody Love You” sees Hawkins himself stepping ever so slightly of his accustomed pedestal of dead-pan geek dispassion with some vaguely shouty bits and Iggy Pop dog howls in the choruses and refrains.
Less restrained it might be, but it’s also very much in the usual Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences ballpark of inscrutable pastiche, skating down a razor edge between ridicule and horrible grinding truth. “You Can’t Make Somebody Love You” says what it says on the tin, and it’s not news, but Hawkins’ character and delivery makes it all the more bleakly honest:
“you say every man you ever meet is too nice or too fucked up /
you wanna meet somebody in between but you never get the luck”
We’ve all met that girl or boy. Or is it just me?
Sticking with the theme of sexual politics, Thee Awkward Silences lumber into the obese Donna Summer-ism of “The Substitute”, powered by a lolloping farty disco bassline and incidental noises. This is the first track by Hawkins where I feel I’ve seen the mask slip far enough for me to be sure it actually is a mask; the weirdness is turned up that one notch extra, to the point where my suspension of disbelief is stretched taut like a fat girls leggings.
Not that there’s anything particularly improbable in this litany of desperately lonely and dysfunctional relationship scenarios, but the balance between humour and existential horror is tilted slightly to the cheery side, and I can hear how much Hawkins enjoyed writing this one.
They’re threatening to release a full Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences album come autumn, and I know if it gets sent to me I’ll have to don my psychic waders and brave the madness, if only for one final attempt to understand the mind of this very strange band. “You Can’t Make Somebody Love You” encapsulates the thing I fear about them, though – that if I finally understand Hawkins, I might become him in the process.
I choose to ignore the possibility that it may already have occurred.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: anti-folk, garage, lo-fi, Paul Hawkins, pop, Thee Awkward Silences, weird, You Can't Make Somebody Love You
