Eef Barzelay
Bitter Honey (spinART)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in The Boston Globe, March 17, 2006

For his solo debut, Clem Snide frontman Eef Barzelay strips down so completely that the tweeting birds on “Little Red Dot” and the compression that makes “Let Us Be Naked” and “Joy To The World” sound like old 78s are the closest he comes to production flourishes. Built on a single forceful acoustic guitar and a voice that Barzelay uses like a bludgeon, Bitter Honey ain’t Nebraska – the simple arrangements just bring Barzelay’s cleverness unavoidably to the fore rather than deepening the scope of the songs, as they did with Bruce Springsteen – but “Ballad Of Bitter Honey” comes close, in its way. It starts the album off with an unsettling fakeout: the first verse invites smirks as the narrator describes her superiority to all the other booty models on a Ludacris video shoot, but then the song undergoes a stunning reversal, explaining exactly how she got there and the pride she takes in simply surviving. Nothing else has the same impact (though his version of Isaac Watts’s eternal “Joy To The World” locates the pathos in what is, by definition, a song of overwhelming happiness), but Barzelay’s songs convey recrimination, tenderness and resignation effectively, if repetitively.

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