Jad Fair & R. Stevie Moore – FairMoore CD

Jad Fair & R. Stevie Moore – FairMoore CD

"Jad Fair spent the first years of the new millennium, over a quarter century into his career, working with a variety of younger musicians in a sort of mentor role. Unfortunately, albums with Yo La Tengo and Teenage Fanclub sounded like nothing more than Yo La Tengo and Teenage Fanclub albums with Jad Fair's loopy vocals stuck willy-nilly on top, a combination that didn't work as well as one might expect. Released in 2002, FairMoore, which partners the Maryland native with Nashville-born, New Jersey-based D.I.Y. expert R. Stevie Moore, is a far more productive and worthwhile album. Moore has been creating his own idiosyncratic brand of home-brewed pop for even longer than Fair (the earliest CD in his enormous catalog was recorded in 1968 by a 16-year-old Moore and his high-school buddies!) and has an even more dedicated cult following; perhaps Moore wasn't scared of Fair's cult hero stature, but more likely, the two oddballs simply recognized each other's strengths and played to them. The result is the best album Fair has been involved with since the heyday of Half Japanese, and one of Moore's most enjoyable efforts in years. Although Moore takes only one lead vocal (on the trippy spoken word offering "Supreme Beings," which mixes one of his typically surreal flights of fancy with organ loops straight out of a Hammer horror feature), his inimitable musical style, which manages to sound utterly poppy and slightly twisted at the same time, is all over this album. (Moore plays almost all of the instruments, barring a couple of guitar and percussion parts, and Fair does nearly all the singing.) The combination of Moore's accessible but odd melodies and arrangements with Fair's stream-of-consciousness lyrics and one of a kind vocals is surprisingly satisfying. The songs are more "normal" than the deliberate primitivism of Half Japanese's albums, yet (unlike the Yo La Tengo and Teenage Fanclub albums) Moore's instinctive grasp of Fair's unique aesthetic gives the album a pleasing unity. Songs like the analog synthesizer throb of "Yeah, You Betcha" and the Bo Diddley-beat opener "Stationary" are downright catchy, something that's almost never been true of Jad Fair's previous albums.  Much more interesting than any of Fair's other collaborations, FairMoore is an essential release for fans of either of the participants." - Stewart Mason / All Music