Review Summary: A relentless and beautiful and glorious 70-minute assault.
"My heart is drawn to the small out of the way things / That I can't help but to give my focus and attention and care" - a noble and unofficial manifesto for someone who, particularly at this point in time, may be the antithesis of nobility. A guy who casually+brutally berates journalists (or any other ill-fated targets that happen to make his acquaintance) in and out of the studio yet shows uber-empathy for dried up lavender and a mangled marsupial can be puzzling and questionable, indeed.
But these kind of contradictory perplexities reinforce the curious fascination now more than ever - not often do we hear a musician describe their concert as such: "…my heart wasn't there / I came back to my room and slouched in my bed", only to assure us in the following track that till he dies he's gonna write songs "that make grown men sh!t their pants like little fvckin' babies".
Universal Themes is stubborn, vulnerable and even infantile, self-deprecating and self-defensive, beautiful and grimy. And besides the expected hypnotic barebones acoustic guitar+drums there's raw dirty-dog-distortion that never could've surfaced on Benji. Other than the customary perpetual peppering of unforgettable scenes, nostalgia-driven detail, everyman-ramblings, and boxing/movie/music references, the main gained strength on this album is the multi-sectioning and accompanying transitionary even-more-barebones acoustic passages.
They not only feel like a nod toward his 70's rock infatuation, but also are great for scene changes: the head-banging ferocity of attending a Godflesh show to the flatly spoken dull calm back-to-reality aftermath ("Then we had pizza and I came back to my apartment"), lonely panoramic wandering and semi-girl-wooing in Switzerland to the comforting relief of coming back home to kitty cats/collard greens/genuine smiles, the discordant+incoherent rage over a friend in pain to the gorgeous+delicate sun-soaked fluttering of a childhood-revisitation block-walk ("It smells so much like our old neighborhoods"). Less dramatic touches are vivid as well - extra plucks for the bluejay pickin' up a seed, keyboard chimes for the handicapped kid deciding what he's gonna do with his life (he's just gonna live it).
He's 48, his gums are fvckin' bleedin', he's got a goddamn ear infection, he rocks the same flip phone as "the smartest guy in the world" ("they said he was a physicist or something like that"). I'm just glad he got out of that big soft bed.
