The Morning After: Dent May's The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele

The Good Feeling Music of Dent May, to be released February 3rd on Paw Tracks

Okay, there’s definitely an element of the terrible here. I mean, look at that album cover. Just look at it. Seriously.

But once you get past that, and listen to the album a dozen times or so, bigger issues start coming up: this Dent May, this straight-from-Mississippi scoundrel, just how serious is he? How much irony is there to his lounge-lizardly, microphone-hanging, bad suit wearing persona? Is all his crooning like an inebriated and discernibly less talented Jens Lekman, all his singing about a formidable cast of losers ranging from college town hangers-on to the unimpeachably woman-rejected to the despondently intoxicated, just part of a master plan to make people smile when listening to music, rather than wallow in the effluvious well of their own bourbonized misery?

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s recognize that this album—taken seriously enough to be picked up by Animal Collective’s label (though don’t make the mistake of thinking this sounds anything like AC)—is pretty fun, even if it’s also pretty, for lack of a better term, dumb. But that dumbness itself is shrouded in a difficult to pin down intellect, with lines like “Joyce, Whitman, and Camus…will know I’ve never read them,” and songs like “You Can’t Force a Dance Party” and “God Loves You, Michael Chang” being so clever and sing-along-able that it’s almost impossible not to like them.

So while the album at first— with its goofy, bad-1940s-wedding-reception instrumentation—sounds like a half-ass experiment in joke-music, multiple listens reveal an earnestness (think Jonathan Richman) that supersedes the irony lying thickly over every nook and cranny. In the end, don’t look here for dazzling virtuosity, or for dourness or elitist self-pity—this is an album best made for slobbery laughter, or for swooning and staggering beneath the dim lights of a really, really cheap chandelier.

Report Card: A-