Clem Snide: "BFF"

My brother and I exchange music like many folks exchange sports factoids, well we do a bit of that as well. A few days ago, he hit me with a song that has become an instant favorite of mine. Clem Snide was probably one of the first bands I remember my brother feeling passionately drawn to, and with good reason. Frontman Eef Barzelay crafts wonderful, soul-bearing lyrics, with musical accompaniments that mirror the spouting of emotions exquisitely, whether feverishly hectic and haphazard or a slow-plodding stream of aches and doubt. After a few years devoting himself to solo projects, Barzelay turned in a 2010 album, The Meat of Life, with his bandmates that simply ranks among the very best work Clem Snide has produced to date.

The track "BFF" is a classic Clem Snide song, featuring Barzelay's frank and deep-reaching emotional lyricism fused with uptempo guitar work and furiously-paced crash of drums and cymbals. Amazingly, "BFF" runs just under two minutes in length, but is injected with such an expanse of feeling, both uncertainty and self-abhorring futility, that it demands the listener to play it back again and again. Barzelay vacillates between closeting his fears, with the opening line yearningly delivered: "Trust me you don't want to know how I really feel," and throwing the door wide open on persistent anxieties in the chorus: "What if what I want is, and what if what I need is / Just a little more than all your love / All your love, all your love." He covets a comfort and spiritual sanctuary from his counterpart that he knows he cannot garner. The track reeks of chord progressions that have become a staple of alt-country bands such as the Old 97's and Drive-By Truckers, which adds amicably both to the playability of the song and Barzelay's conflicting, dithering outbursts of the emotional. "BFF" is one of the core tracks from an album that has been vastly overlooked in 2010.