Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm
This past week I’ve been listening to Aimee Mann’s new album, The Forgotten Arm. Beautiful stuff, perhaps even better than her previous outing, Lost in Space. And it wouldn’t be a half-review of an Aimee Mann album without mentioning that she’s really not singing about pleasant relationships. So when I say something like, “I think ‘I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas’ is a real stand-out,” I’m not being facetious. Even better, “Little Bombs,” one of my favorites, has a couple lines of that catch my ear each time they play past:
Life just kind of empties out
Less a deluge than a drought
Less a giant mushroom cloud
than an unexploded shell
inside a cell
in the Lennox Hotel.
How great is that bit of sadness? It’s like a vitamin that won’t go down.
She’s got the whole album up for listening on her website, and she’ll be here in June at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, at which point I look forward to listening to some of the best sad songs on the market.
May 12th, 2005 at 8:07 am
There’s really only one thing that could lift this album up into the stratosphere of all-time greatest recordings. The answer? More cowbell! If they were smart, and used a certain brand of cowbell, its quite possible that Aimee Mann’s newest effort could make Sgt. Pepper’s look downright amateurish.