Tough Love

So today I got a belated birthday present to myself in the mail: Hamell on Trial's newest album, Tough Love, and a free 9-track sampler from his previous album Ed's Not Dead (which I already have a copy of, but what the heck --- I'll take the pre-order freebie bonus, yes I will). I'm on my second listening, and so far I'm having a good time. The very first song, for instance, is straight out of The Onion's brilliant post-9/11 issue ("God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule"). The title song is some fucked-up shit, set to a catchy tune that's probably going to be stuck in my head pretty soon. Also I like "There is a God", in which all the assholes of the world do the honorable thing and shoot themselves or devote their lives to good works, and "First Date", which is kind of a "what not to do" manual. My one big complaint is that there's not nearly as much Hamell kicking all ass one-guy-and-one-guitar style as on his early albums, although of course there is some of that too, and I guess that's why they gave me the live CD.

Seriously, though, what this album makes me think of most is Dan Bern's 50 Eggs, which was sort of his second album and sort of his third but either way was a big collaboration with Ani DiFranco, for better or for worse. A lot of hardcore Dan Bern fans insist that it was a big mistake, that Ani influenced him too much, blah-de-blah, but whatever. Dude learned a lot, okay? It's easy to understand how he could've been blown away by working with Ani, but on the whole it worked out for the best. Hamell, on the other hand, has been making music and touring and generally being himself for way longer than Dan had when he first worked with Ani, so he holds his own, even though Tough Love was released on Righteous Babe (Ani's label). You can hear Ani (literally and figuratively) on some of the songs on Tough Love, but she's not as ubiquitous as she was on 50 Eggs. I'm probably going to go over the liner notes to the Bern album and compare it now, because I'm intriguing myself with this comparison. Yeah.