The Short Happy Life, The Album Is Also Called ‘The Short Happy Life’

For a few tracks, the home-brewed nerd-pop of Jerry Fels’s one-man band the Short Happy Life (a name also used by a completely different band about five years ago) has a certain offhand charm, especially on songs like the lo-fi synth-pop of “What The Body Wants” and “Oh Carrie Brownstein,” a frustrated (for a hundred reasons) love song to a woman who has surely inspired scads of unrequited crushes. Then The Album Is Also Called ‘The Short Happy Life’ collapses into the simplistic and cutesy singalongs of an acoustic-slinging, thin-voiced bedroom rat whose thoughts of the girl of his dreams send him breathlessly through cringe-inducing lines like, “I want so badly to go to sleep/But you’re keeping me up/And not in the good way.” As with Atom and His Package, a little of Fels’s schtick goes a long way, but if he doesn’t have the former’s pop-intelligentsia logorrhea, he also lacks the hookiness and focus that make him/them occasionally tolerable; say what you want about Atom Goren, the guy never comes off as sloppy or half-assed. The Album Is Also Called ‘The Short Happy Life’ aims for modest pleasures, but then, it has much to be modest about.