Lost in Space
Few singer-songwriters have explored the idea of love as both savior and destroyer quite as thoroughly as Aimee Mann. From last year's "@#%&*! Smilers" to her 1993 debut solo album, to her days fronting the seminal New Wave band, Till Tuesday, Mann has eloquently and cleverly supported and skewered the benefits of love for the soul, along with the crushing effects the absence and often the presence of the emotion can have.
Mann's fourth album, "Lost in Space," finds her in comfortable territory. However, the fact that the record does not find Mann simply retreading old ground is a testament to her abilities as a trenchant lyricist and remarkable musician.
The central theme of "Lost in Space" is love as a narcotic. This is a pretty standard rock trope, explored by everyone from Roxy Music to Britney Spears. However, most of these songs explore love's intoxicating powers. Mann takes a different approach, examining what happens when lovers come down from their highs and find emptiness and frustration marking their every move.
A handful of the songs depict the strain addictions and compulsions can put on a relationship, when all the love on earth is not enough to combat their effects. Album-opener "Humpty Dumpty" sees Mann plagued by dependency, the support of her lover unable to overcome her feelings of inadequacy and the sense she is headed toward self-destruction. The next song, "High on Sunday 51," reverses the roles, with Mann offering her love as a last-ditch substitute for her junkie companion's drug of choice. To paraphrase, "Real Bad News," also on this album, most tunes on "Space" depict a personality who ". . . could not stem the tide of overwhelm/And thirst." They "try to keep it going, but a lot of avenues/ Just aren't open to you/ When you're real bad news."
Mann has always walked a fine line between introspection and self-pity, and her deft maneuvering between the two is in full force on "Space." All of the songs tend to be heavy, and most find the singer in a state of vulnerability and angst. However, the album never gets too bogged down in mopeyness. Indeed, though "Space" is home to some of Mann's quietest songs, like the spectacular "Invisible Ink," it also hosts several tunes that rock harder than Mann's 1995 guitar-oriented album, "I'm with Stupid." "Today's the Day" features a soaring chorus and an excellent, noisy solo while "Pavlov's Bell" might be the closest to arena rock Mann will ever get.
Though she undertakes an excellent study of the perils of becoming addicted to love, the drug metaphor does become a bit tired in places. Songs like "This Is How It Goes" and "Guys Like Me" treat the theme too overtly; when Mann sings "It's all about drugs/ It's all about shame" in "Goes," it chips away at the subtlety and intelligence present in so many of the other songs on the album.
Lyrical hiccups aside, "Space" easily joins the ranks of Mann's excellent albums. It is not as perfect as the preceding album, "Bachelor No.2," nor does it possess the concept-album cohesion of the subsequent record, "The Forgotten Arm," but "Space" contains many of Mann's best songs, bolstered by a set of unique, spacey soundscapes unavailable in the rest of the singer-songwriter's catalogue. If Bryan Ferry wrote "Love is the drug/ And I need the score," then Mann writes about what happens in detox.