Though there are many bands that build careers on exploring the shortcomings of love, few can dwell as intently or as beautifully on the heartache and misery that naturally accompany relationships as The Good Life. The Omaha-based band's latest album, Help Wanted Nights, is perhaps the band's most probing and far-reaching analysis of broken hearts in every saddening interaction with the opposite sex. Despite the album's admirably stripped-down and passionate attempt to capture the doomed pursuit of finding love, Help Wanted Nights still has to work extremely hard to convince us that some new and interesting seeds of romantic despair are sown on ground that has been painfully trodden many times before.
Help Wanted Nights, which is described on the band's record company website as originally conceived as a soundtrack to a screenplay developed by front man Tim Kasher, picks up right where The Good Life left off with its 2004 release Album of the Year, a depressing linear story of a long relationship's demise and aftermath over a year. The opening track "On the Picket Fence" has Kasher's seasoned voice lamenting the ambiguity and indecision that accompany an unfulfilling relationship, which is in keeping with The Good Life's soft, somber and occasionally bitterly peppy or passionately anguished sound. Unlike Album of the Year, though, this new collection of sweetly gloomy songs doesn't dwell on just one dying relationship, but also includes Kasher's depressing descriptions of the evanescent love involved in one-night stands and the painful efforts to cope and move on after love fails him.
What keeps these relentless accounts of romantic woes from growing old — other than the fact that the ten songs clock in at just more than 30 minutes — is that when Kasher verges on wallowing in his misery, there is an abrupt musical shift to a grand and heartbreaking intensity performed with barebones desperation. Indeed, it is not hard to picture The Good Life playing its broken heart out in the lonely small-town bar depicted on the album's cover.
And just as self-centered pity gives way to beautiful outbursts of frustration with the elusive nature of happiness, the album's rosy and romanticized songs about encounters with other lost and damaged souls are nicely offset by Kasher's brooding pessimism. Songs like "A Little Bit More" and "Keely Aimee" are catchy, but are still incapable of escaping Kasher's inherent sense of loss and inevitable failure. In "Heartbroke," the lyrical sadness is ironically set to a poppy little number that bitterly mocks the idea of a mutual loss after a breakup, with Kasher asking his ex, "You claim your pain, but where's the bruise?"
Where The Good Life really shines is in the moments that its aching playfulness and raw emotion are combined, as in the track "Some Tragedy," which is easily the album's best song. It is here that Kasher is at his broken best, singing of finding momentary happiness with a stranger. With the unfortunate wisdom that comes from repeated disappointment, Kasher mourns the unhealthy emotional effects and rejoices in the forgetting that comes with giving into passion with another lonely soul. Fully aware of how these actions will result in nothing but another "fucked up tragedy," the song ends with a noisy and heartbreakingly beautiful confession of how Kasher will take these emotional lumps because it is only in these doomed encounters that he can make any connection to others or find relief from his romantic depression.
This fruitless and flawed pursuit of home is perhaps the entire theme of Help Wanted Nights. It is a celebration of the painful search for love on every front, which — at least for Kasher and crew — is a losing battle. Though everyone has heard their share of musical heartache, rarely is it analyzed with such complete introspection or with such sincere passion.
3 1/2 stars out of 5
