JenByeDiscReview

$jen bye Less Than Perfect For This World [Bad Sister Music] (2007) Taking five years to figure out who you are before presenting yourself to the world can be a good thing, especially if the goal is to offer the truest essence of yourself. With Less Than Perfect For This World, Los Angeles based recording artist Jen Bye discovers there are still sadnesses to overcome, recriminations to redress, and memories to resign. Five years isn’t enough time; and the desire for perfection is a sanctified endeavor that lasts forever. Yet the woman with a dangerous heart succeeds in making herself better; and all of her imperfections become poignant reflections on this well crafted record of songs that goes for beautiful songwriting over shock value or a falsified image of what a female Rock ‘n Roll artist is. Opening Bye’s full length debut is “Heaven,” a song that shows not all has been black and white in this artist’s life nor in herself as a person. It’s not without irony that Bye can be broken as much as she can hurt somebody else. “And everything you said filled up my crazy little head; and I hung on to every breath. I fell so hard beside you in my bed” is the same girl who as a woman turns to confess her self-imposed lack of vulnerability from the past; a brittle armor dissolving into dust that never shielded her from much anyway. “And I’d do anything to cleanse you of my sting; and I will turn around and leave if you’d be better off without me.” Less Than Perfect For This World traverses between hard core sensuality, self effacing doubt, and the disintegration of past hurts so profoundly felt by the listener only because Bye chooses to peel back the layers covering her soul, revealing bruises healed by time and a sense of grace that comes with age and personal evolution. What makes Bye’s new record powerful are the places she takes the listener; places of different vantage points from which and within the audience can feel the songs. Sometimes you’re taken back into the past as though it’s in the thick of a painful present. Sometimes the feeling is retrospective like an old faded photograph in the mind that never seems to fully decay. All of it’s real and none of it is. If Less Than Perfect For This World is the expression of a woman who lost herself and grabbed 99% of her spirit back to turn it into songs of a different kind, the other 1% Bye has yet to find shows itself as a detour in “Arse,” a slight regression back to an image that’s more in line with who this artist may have been, creatively, at one point, but is thrown into the mix of Less Than Perfect For This World not so much as an indication of what’s still less than perfect, but rather as a shameless, personal acknowledgment that who you were or even who you pretended to be is as much a direct line to who you are now as what the potential is for you to be in the future. Where “Arse” is dirty and driving, where it’s a diversion on a boulevard of brazen sexuality, justifying its self-demeaning pleasure in a reversal of pussy power that’s perceived more for emotional preservation than what’s true in actuality, the rest of the songs on Less Than Perfect For This World are picturesque narratives that sometimes play like individually short movies, threading together all the less than perfect fractures of living. You’re the person who watches with your ears; or you’re the person who’s experiential. Which one you are depends on the song. Sometimes you’re both. The songs are Jen Bye’s, but they’re every bit the listener’s songs as well. They’re right for a world that’s less than perfect and, by extension, right for all the people who are less than perfect for it. Songs such as “Anyone,” and “Mexico” are two very different reels with an underlying, albeit maybe distant connection to one another in that they represent abstract stages of finding relevance and realness in the world. Some of those stages are beset by confusion, sadness, even deterioration. Going through them is prettier than the hell of looking for what’s lost and never coming back. Even then, sometimes the surroundings have lost themselves. What remains is a shell of the vitality that once permeated the air and brought everything to life; or as Bye sings on “San Francisco,” “Now I’m not trying to run away. There’s just nothing left to make me stay. There’s too many demons and too many years.” Bye isn’t without sentimentality as evidenced in her songs. The material is interwoven with sorrow and regret at regular intervals. As developed in an emotional sense as the record is, as ripe for a brighter tomorrow as Bye seems to be, Less Than Perfect For This World won’t take away the feeling inside. In fact, the effect is the opposite, regardless of whatever that feeling may have been at one time or even what it is now. Yet Bye’s delivery exudes a certain acceptance and strength of character that eases the pain. A combination of hurt and frustration that finds its way to a bittersweet light, Less Than Perfect For This World is the record of an artist who’s found herself, not that of a 20-something woman searching for an identity. Production-wise, Bye’s debut is an exercise in less is more. Casually wrought, it’s not, but the effect is natural. There are spaces in between the elements with excellent separation in the mix. Overall, the ambience is open, not constrictive or deadened. Less Than Perfect For This World is fully produced without being overproduced. By the same token, the instrumentation and production ambience can shift from track to track in a focused conception of each song’s story without breaking up the continuity of the record. All of it’s done without cheap flavor-of-the-month production tricks nor self indulgent arrangements.. Rather, in large part, this fine debut relies more on interlocking acoustic and electric guitars of various tones, some fine piano parts of simplicity, drums and bass that serve the songs and, most notably, soulful vocal performances. Less Than Perfect For This World may not expand beyond main genre lines, but neither is it monochromatic in style, either. Less Than Perfect For This World is a pop/rock record in essence. Just as pop/rock is a generalized header under which different sub-genres fall, so it is that Bye displays a broad range of sounds on a set of songs that only could have come from someone who has lived them. -- Greg Debonne All lyrical excerpts © 2007 She Wolf Publishing (ASCAP) Cover art © 2007 Bad Sister Music Visit Jen Bye online: http://www.jenbye.net http://www.myspace.com/jenbye Less Than Perfect For This World can be purchased at http://www.cdbaby.com or at the iTunes Music Store$ shapeimage_2_link_0