Horizontal Ladies Club

How much you wanna bet I'm gonna absolutely detest how much I like this album? 

That is of course a joke based on the lead off track, but Tom Marolda is a very Todd Rundgren meets They Might Be Giants with a Limp Bizkit sense of humor kind of guy. You absolutely have to remember this is 1995 Gen X humor and should be taken as ironic as possible. That's confusing, I know, what with all the different flavors they make at the irony factory these days, but capital I Irony happens when the significance of action differs for the agent and the observer. Think Alannis Morissette's "Ironic." It IS ironic that the character asks "isn't it ironic?" whenever life creeps up on her in its funny way. Likewise, it IS ironic to make blonde jokes about women you are very much attracted to sexually. The actual string of words "God Is A Girl" IS ironic because 1995 American English requires God to be a man so that Tom Marolda can inflammatorily call him a girl.

None of which explains why the guitarist from Bon Jovi has 3 co-songwriter credits on this thing. I'm just gonna assume Richie Sambora was super high that weekend, because musically speaking this is very much Alternative Rock; not even remotely slippery, let alone halfway there on a bed of roses. It's also important to know that Tom isn't a nobody, it's just that nobody's ever heard of him. Regardless of prolifery, the world can only handle so many songwriters from New Jersey, you know?

The point is that Horizontal Ladies Club is supposed to strike you as scandalously outlandish in an almost R. Stevie Moore kind of way. I say almost because this isn't in any way intentionally or serendipitously amateurish; Tom Maroldo's albums are very much professional business cards. I don't pretend to understand the various numbering systems of Domo Records at all, but the first artist they ever signed was Kitaro, then this came out a year later, so i'm good without any logic here at all. 

It's good though, really good, so long as you don't relapse into taking the misogyny for serious. That's a tough thing not to do, honestly, considering that the point of the album is "I hate how much I actually love the women (read whores) I'm supposed to be objectifying." David Foster Wallace would of course point out that the irony of expressing love in the language if hate is how they getcha, and fair enough, but where's my MacArthur Fellowhip?

I guess we have to get a bearing on Modernism to understand what I'm even talking about here. K, Modernism is the earnest belief in the techno-political progressivism of whenever your "now" is. Now we're making headway, now we're getting somewhere, now is going to lead to a pretty awesome future, that kind of thing.

What happens when you start to think "wait a minute, we're not getting anywhere, everything is as terrible as it always was and I'm very skeptical about it"? Postmodernism happens, that's what. Are you skeptical of the Keto diet and Chinese Democracy and plastic surgery and gender-affirmng health care? Congratulations, you're post-modern. 

Can you smell the sarcasm on that last sentence? Not sure which direction I'm being serious in? Welcome to post-postmodernism! Is it a new kind of sincerity? Is it intentionally both/and like meaning itself lives on a fluid spectrum? Nobody knows! It's great and/or terrible at the same time, unless it's opposite day.

1995 though, that one's easy, that's postmodern irony through and through, no rock and rolling all night, no partying every day, just stultifying cynicism and the desperate desire to turn the TV off FOREVER. 

Give it a swig. I'm not promising you'll like it, I'm just saying it has a unique flavor you should at least be able to recognize.