When Clem Snide began recording albums more than a decade ago in New York, the band’s clever alt-country songs often came across as an ironic take on Americana. Everyone knows you can’t do country music in the big city, and where did Israeli-born singer/guitarist Eef Barzelay get that twang from, anyway? After years of slogging through the indie-rock touring circuit, a band breakup and a move to Nashville, the reunited Clem Snide has earned the all-American desperation and heartbreak that lies in the marrow of its latest album, The Meat Of Life, out this week on 429 Records. Barzelay is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Barzelay: I find it intense to think that only after we are gone from this earth does it return to the Garden of Eden. The earth is truly a living, breathing thing, and we are just parasites, consuming. Like a slightly larger version of the microscopic creatures that live off our dead skin and sweat, such are we upon this earth and now she’s running a fever so’s to hopefully kill us off already. And according to The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, how wonderfully relieved she will be once that’s done. Really, I find it all very exciting and beautiful, but no one ever wants to get into it with me at parties, so I keep it to myself. God bless us, everyone. Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJVQowigxFM
