The Gothic Archies: The Tragic Treasury

I like to think, smugly, that I was ahead of the game on the Lemony Snicket scene. Back in 2000 I bought The Bad Beginning (on import from the US, since it was not yet published in the UK) as a Christmas present for D's elder son. We read it over New Year in a converted barn in Norfolk, and it must have gone down quite well, because he got several of the later books. I was hoovering up everything connected with Stephin Merritt at this point, and, as Daniel Handler (Snicket's 'representative') played accordion on 69 Love Songs, that was enough to make him blessed by the touch of Stephin's metaphorical garment. I also read Handler's first adult novel, The Basic Eight, which I absolutely loved — like Nabokov doing Beverley Hills 90210 (or so I imagine, not having seen the latter) — however his second one did not impress at all.

Scream and Run Away, the first track on this album, was also briefly available many years ago as a crappy-quality MP3 on the Lemony Snicket site. I found it difficult to get too excited when this came out as I kind of knew already what it was going to be like. Stephin is determinedly avoiding the singer-songwriter role that would require him to give us regular updates on the tortured passage of his soul, and opting instead to do work-for-hire that applies his phenomenal skills to other people's stories. Which is fine, but it somehow becomes more predictable than the work where he has to make up his own stories.

No big surprises here, then. Some clever wordplay and rhymes, and I enjoy it when sets up a risqué challenge like finding a child-friendly rhyme for 'thuggery' — and then rises to it exquisitely with the line 'sculleries, skulls and skullduggery'. Giving himself a fairly narrow palette of sounds and instruments, he also does some smart tricks with the recording and production.

Any Stephin fan appreciates a good footnote, but recently we seem to be getting nothing but footnotes. Very postmodern.

MusicBrainz entry for this album