The Second Coming of the Sloppy Boys
Not too long ago I wrote effusively of 2018’s Lifelong Vacation, the debut album from The Sloppy Boys, a party rock trio made up of members of comedy troupe The Birthday Boys who also wrote for IFC’s Comedy Bang Bang, one of my all-time favorite television shows and a cult classic I find myself returning to over and over again, the ultimate television comfort food. I might even have given The Sloppy Boys credit for saving rock and roll by singing about partying, having fun, drinking beer and being in a band, and also for being the only band that matters.
I don’t go in for half measures. When I like something I like something. I REALLY liked Lifelong Vacation. The Sloppy Boys may have started out as a weird conceptual goof of a band but somewhere along the line some Pinocchio type shit happened and they became a real band that really rocks.
Like Nas’ Illmatic, Lifelong Vacation was just about perfect. How do you improve on perfection? What do you do for a follow-up when you knock it out to the point that you become the gold standard for flawless debuts? That was a a question facing both a young Nas and The Sloppy Boys.
The answer for The Sloppy Boys at least was to release the prototypical bigger, more ambitious follow-up. This time around they’re a little less, well, sloppy, and a little more assured. Now there are horns and harmonica other unmistakable signs of growth, or at least ambition.
Dancing on the Wind even closes with “Classic New York Night”, a marathon riff on Big Apple kitsch that passes the eight minute mark as it chronicles a New York night so epic and all-inconclusive that it not only features delights like watching the Yankees play the Globetrotters “on the ice at MSG” but also side trips to Chicago, Florida, Los Angeles and plenty of other places that somehow manage to be part of a New York evening despite not being anywhere near New York, or even the East Coat. “Classic New York Night” needs to be that long in order to properly chronicle a magical evening when everything in the world, but more specifically in New York, happens for the singer and his pals.
The emphasis on Dancing on the Wind has shifted. I’m not going to lie: the intense focus on partying, rocking out, drinking beer and being in a band is a big part of what made The Sloppy Boys’ debut so transcendent, powerful and timeless. This time, however, they’re more interested in New York and California as actual states and real places but also as cliches, ideas, as fantasies rooted more in dreams and our endlessly idealized and romanticized pop culture past than any manner of objective reality.
The kick off song, for example, finds Mike, Jeff and Tim being feted by the biggest rock icons of the East Coast but longing so desperately for their California homes that they’re unable to do things that remind them of it, like watching television or movies while on “East Coast Wedding” the trio make like the Marx Brothers, or a young Beastie Boys, or the Fat Boys in Disorderlies and run joyfully amok at nuptials for a hapless colleague.
But the trio’s growth as songwriters and musicians is most evident on its gloriously excessive closing number, an epic fever dream of God’s own New York City that’s also somehow also about every other major city in the United States and some international destinations outside the United States as well.
“Classic New York Night” doesn’t even get around to mentioning New York for a good two minutes as it wistfully looks back at idyllic visits to major cities all over the world before chronicling an ultimate night out so packed with incident it would take a couple of months, if not years, to do everything described in it and also require use of a personal jet loaded up with fuel for international flights.
The song starts out as a relatively straightforward valentine to the New York of the tourist imagination and grows sillier and sillier until it’s describing an absurdist Empire State that could never exist and also somehow also involves notable tourist attractions from Chicago and California.
Many of Dancing on The Wind’s best, most notable songs are geography-based but not all of them. On the hilarious and sneakily satirical country rocker “Radio Dayze” the singer waxes dewy and nostalgic over the rock and pop Gods that filled their younger days with music and magic and allowed them to escape the misery of their everyday lives into a musical wonderland of top 40 hits.
Only instead of pining for the sainted, acceptable likes of Wolfman Jack, Johnny Cash, Nirvana, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or Hank Williams he’s name-dropping the actual shitty artists that have historically dominated the airwaves and filled our collective pasts with plastic garbage like Limp Bizkit, Jennifer Lopez’s “My Love Don’t Cost a Thing” and Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi.”
One of the things I love about The Sloppy Boys is how little of their music seems to take place in the present; consequently “Radio Dayze” depicts radio’s primary competition as shiny, soulless CDs rather than digital music. Mentally, the Boys seem stuck in the 1970s and 1980s but they venture into the 1990s sometimes as well.
The album takes its title, gloriously enough, from the singer rhapsodizing about the voices of Linkin Park and the Yin Yang Twins dancing in the wind. The individual references kill, like being moved to tears by the symphonic schlock of Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” and letting your mind wander with Fatboy Slim but the song attains an additional hilarity from its cumulative depiction of a nostalgic farm boy with a deep emotional connection to seemingly EVERY pop song and hit-maker that made the charts in the 1990s and oughts, regardless of genre, style or substance.
The nostalgic radio fan loves Eagle Eye Cherry, Slipknot, Incubus and pretty much anyone who ever made it onto a Now That’s What I Call Music compilation but the song is delivered with the country-fried conviction of someone fondly recalling the all-time greats and how their transcendent art allowed them to overcome a hardscrabble existence as a poor farmhand whose family just barely held it together. It’s the wonderfully misplaced twang with which “Master P, I could relate to him” is delivered that really destroys.
I laughed out loud at “Radio Dayze” and other songs on the album long after the jokes should have lost their charm and become as flavorless as old chewing gum because the music is so infectious and the singing and playing so full of ragged, goofy charm. Dancing on the Wind is not quite as consistent as the debut, in part because it’s longer and more ambitious and less focussed but it is still a goddamn delight from a band that’s more fun than should be legally allowed.
The Sloppy Boys aren’t just a band: they’re a way of life, a state of mind. And their magnificent second album makes me prouder than ever to be a Slop Head.
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