DIY Mastermind Finds Writers Block

Ethan Tufts, like some scrawny hipster version of Terry Malloy, might at first glance appear to be determined to make a tough first impression.  Tufts is the guy behind the Los Angeles one-man band State Shirt - and his new album, This is Old, is a study in blunt loathing.

Tufts-the poor soul whose website refers to his “inescapable, mind-numbing full-time job,” the “droning” misery caused by it, his desperate yearning to quit it, etc., at least five times-apparently intends the album to be some sort of communiqué to glum commuters everywhere. It is meant, he says, “…to describe captivity in a familiar never-ending cycle: work, drink, sleep, repeat.”  But in making tedium and small-time oppression his subject, he has risked being dreary himself, and it looks like it finally got to him.  If, as he says, This is Old is meant to “[prove] that monotonous lives can have exceptional results,” then why, on the opening track, is he singing “I hate all that I’ve become”? If Tufts can’t manage to make his blues at least a little more intelligent than this, he should give back the Killers’ drum machine.

Elsewhere on the State Shirt website you may find him pictured smiling at his dog, but Tufts insists on a broad self-destructive streak. At a critical point-immediately following the suspense of a bass-free bridge section that holds out the tantalizing hope that it will change and save itself-the title track finally collapses in a stupid chant: “The finest things in life I will always refuse / The worst things in life I will always abuse.”  Veiled threats get the response they deserve, and here all we can say is “Sucks to be you!”  Does Tufts not realize that bummed-out artists have occasionally walked the walk?  Later in the album he sort of backs off, admitting “I’m too afraid to kill myself / and too afraid to really live.”  So I don’t even know the final score here.  Should we be worried about him or not?

We expect a few technical difficulties in a guy still figuring out how to work his personality-projector. They’re just more sharply disappointing in this case because Tufts, this haplessly scrambled lyrical ego, happens to be a skilled, sensitive instrumentalist and D.I.Y. producer, whose sparkling guitar lines favorably recall the Edge. And we’ve been following him since Don’t Die several years back with great hopes in what we heard then with some much needed time behind the pen. This, however, is the record of an unbalanced talent; Tufts’ considerable gifts as a composer and musician are wasted on his graceless poetry.  This is not old.  This is stale.

Bill Porter