Episode 41: Fewer Moving Parts (David Bazan, 2006)

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It was early spring of 2012 and two friends and I were winding through Williamsburg toward the East River, working our way toward the apartment of a stranger. The building was one of those swanky, newly constructed shiny high-rises that had been and continue to pop up and penetrate the Brooklyn skyline, stalagmite-like. We entered, nodded to the doorman like we belonged there, got into the elevator, pushed the button labeled “PH,” and up and up we went.

The sun was setting over Manhattan as we entered the apartment, and in the far corner, beyond the forty or so mingling attendees, tucked into the semicircular crush of couches and chairs—there, setting up a floor lamp that he had seemingly brought with him, was David Bazan.

Bazan is a curious character in the world of indie rock, mainly given his past as a so-called Christian rock musician, and his present as an apostate. While his faith was true and steady and the music and lyrics were certainly not put-on, “Christian rock” was a badge that, if he wore at all, he wore partially obscured. He formed Pedro the Lion—less a band than a process, he says—in 1995 while attending a Pentecostal liberal arts college just outside of his hometown of Seattle. It’s not hard to find write-ups of Pedro the Lion’s music that are completely oblivious to the fact that the band had any ties to the Christian rock scene at all, so subtle the songs were. Heavy-handedness was never the way. At school, where this son of a Pentecostal music pastor spent a couple years studying religion and philosophy before dropping out to focus on touring, he began to shed, as he puts it, “the first, most absurd layers of his cultural belief system—namely the Pentecostal layers.”

What started turning him was a growing awareness that the Christianity he had practiced was in fact blocking the kind of ethical behavior he wanted to engage in. Over the years, to the dismay of many family, friends, and fans, that shedding would become more and more complete. For a while, it seemed that the space his jettisoned religious baggage left was being filled with alcohol. By mid-2004, Bazan’s drinking was becoming a serious problem. He ditched the Pedro the Lion moniker the following year—ending a ten-year run—and took it upon himself to cut out on his own, to “go solo,” culminating in the 2006 self-release of his debut EP under his own name—and this week’s Album of the Week—Fewer Moving Parts.

Eyeing the track list, the first things you notice about the album is that it is comprised of five songs performed in electric, full-band arrangement, and then those same five songs are performed again, in order, with just acoustic guitar and voice. In the hands of a lesser artist, this move—particularly on an album of essentially brand new songs—might fall totally flat, but Bazan has a way about his acoustic arrangements that both breathe new life into the tunes—a new perspective, not least for most via a new key—and somehow radiate with the glowing remainder of the full-band sound with minimal tools: the second iteration is haunted by the specter of the first. In this sense it’s anything but redundant.

Looking at the first song, “Selling Advertising,” as an example, the initial, full-band instance is bold and nearly fanfare-ish with its wild drum fills and pew-pewing synths, underpinning the lyrics which lay sardonically into music reviewers, saying, “You're so creative with your reviews / of what other people do / How satisfying that must be for you,” comparing the artist/critic relationship to an an