Pedro the Lion - Winners Never Quit

Stories of Greed and Betrayal
a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

David Bazan, the singer/songwriter of Pedro the Lion, is as mild-mannered a lead singer as you'll find.  His sincere, softspoken style has given his music a distinctly serious quality that has gained a large audience in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.  On the impressive EP "The Only Reason I Feel Secure" and the sensational full-length album "It's Hard to Find a Friend", he developed an instantly recognizable sound, a simple storytelling voice with acoustic accompaniment that meditated on the hypocrisy of the self-righteous, the self-deceit of those who wreck relationships, and his own struggling conscience.  Pedro the Lion might be The Cure of  alt-Christian rock, gloomy, racked with doubt, and leaning heavily on bass-line hooks and moody melodies.  As in the Psalms, many lyrics express anger towards God and distrust in the Master's justice, but these sentiments give way to self-doubt, self-condemnation, crises of conscience, and eventually a return to acknowledgement of God's sovreignty.  

While "It's Hard to Find a Friend" was a lasting and powerful work, Pedro the Lion's style seemed to have run its course by the end.  Another album of solemnly mellow songs like that and it would be time for the audience to move on to something new.  Fortunately, with "Winners Never Quit", Bazan has moved on.  While the first few songs carry some of the same tone, they gradually build, metamorphizing into a grand, solid, electric rock-and-roll sound that has more in common with Foo Fighters than Seattle's other mopey folk singer extraordinaire Elliott Smith.

And that's not all this album has to recommend it.  Bazan has crafted something far more ambitious here.  It's a concept album, nine songs that seem to give us different chapters in the story of a troubled pair of brothers, one self-righteous and successful, the other an alcoholic and filled with self-loathing.  The "good" brother is religious, legalistic, and cold-heartedly assured he's going to heaven.  The troubled brother is plagued by guilt for "tarnishing the family name."  One road leads to monstrous deeds, the other to despair.  It's a painful work, not the kind of music you can just put on as a soundtrack for other things.

As the music steps up to a new level, and the vision grows more ambitious, the emotions are becoming more focussed, sharper, louder.   The anger here is palpable, surfacing from the murky waters of the previous works and rearing its ugly head.  And yes, there are the same challenges to God that we've come to expect from Bazan.  But, curiously, they seem more desperate, more evasive, when we hear them coming from characters who have done such terrible damage to themselves.   When a terrible sin is commited in the narrative, the almost sarcastically happy refrain of "Bad Things to Such Good People"is unsettling: "All the while/ the good Lord smiled/ and looked the other way."  But even more frightening is the good-brother politician in "Eye on the Finish Line", who becomes a monster in order to achieve a "greater good".

Bazan recently responded to a question about the changes in his songwriting style, saying, "Art is at its most vital when it's diorienting, indefinite.  And I fail in this area a lot, because I grew up in a Christian culture that was pointed, concerete; necessarily definitive all the time.   This approach creates tension and misunderstanding, and that doesn't seem to fly in popular culture.  To really examine something is too painstaking: We don't have the time, energy, or care enough about it."

Those with the time, energy, and care will find rewards in this work.  Typical Christian audiences will want a happy ending, a resolution, an assurance that God has got things under control.  They won't get it.   Bazan is a believer, yes, but one who isn't afraid to ask questions. That makes his journey so much more interesting than that of  predicatble and typical Christian rockers. But the fact that he still believes, still holds convictions about faith and the goodness of God, that should make him something of an enigma in the larger musical arena, where his popularity is growing fast.  (Spin Magazine named "It's Hard to Find a Friend" one of the Ten Best Albums You Didn't Hear in 1998.)  Among songwriters, Bazan has already joined a select group of intriguing artists (Bono, Sam Phillips, Daniel Lanois, Bruce Cockburn) those who lead spiritual explorations through questions rather than answers.  And he's just getting started.  I can't wait to see where he goes from here, in lyric, in sound, and in his spirited conversations with God.