The Last Laugh, the collaborative album between UK-based songwriter Helena Costas and Brooklyn-based Danger Mouse, immediately calls to mind Joanna Newsom’s 2006 masterpiece, Ys. The album paired an idiosyncratic songwriter known for very sparse arrangements with renowned producer and arranger Van Dyke Parks, as well as the legendary studio magicians Jim O’Rourke and Steve Albini. Through Newsom’s brilliant songwriting and Park’s lush arrangements, they crafted one of the decade’s finest albums (in my opinion, of course). In Joker’s Daughter, Helena Costas and Danger Mouse combine the former’s folk pop proclivities with the latter’s penchant for hip-hop and psychedelia, and the results are mostly awkward and cumbersome.
Costas sounds as if she were raised on a steady diet of Pentangle, Nick Drake, and Vashti Bunyan, but somehow didn’t assimilate any of the qualities that made them so great. She has no doubt studied Newsom’s vocal delivery, and even perfectly mimics the way she forms her “to”-s, these alveolar consonants so perfectly enunciated that it would be hard to believe the semblance coincidental. What’s really annoying about the album is that Costas’ appropriation of Newsom’s style isn’t backed up by lyrical brilliance or inventive song structure. While Newsom crafted a 16-minute epic in which she poured out her soul while retaining a surprisingly fluid diction (e.g., rhyming “sick weight” with “inchoate”), Joker’s Daughter’s songs are burdened with cliché.
“Nothing Is Ever What It Seems” is as trite as the title would lead you to believe. On “Cake and July,” Costas sings, “And the years disappear between somewhere and nowhere.” “Yellow Teapot” contains such nuggets as “Oh the color TV screens/ Tell ’em all what they want and they need to have/ Some get and some don’t/ Some will only admire from a distance.” She occasionally implements some pretty, natural imagery (“Rushing till the dawn comes to paint the wheat fields gold”), but even these moments aren’t enough to outweigh the mediocre lyricism that dominates.
Danger Mouse’s production was well-suited for Beck’s Modern Guilt and his collaborations with Cee-Lo Green and MF Doom, but Brian Burton’s psych and hip-hop touches are really hit-or-miss on The Last Laugh. His string arrangements, laidback drumming, and analog synth lines well-complement album opener and lead single “Worm’s Head,” but the arrangements on “Go Walking” and “Nothing Is Ever What It Seems” are laughably grave without a matching lyrical profundity. Most often, though, his instrumental additions are very whimsical. “The Running Goblin” sounds like it should have soundtracked some off-brand children’s movie (you know, from the kind of studio that makes straight-to-video movies like Transmorphers when Transformers gets a theatrical release). “Yellow Teapot,” however, is appropriately puerile given the immature, naïve subject matter (banal statements about materialism, yearning for innocence by way of yellow teapots and magic carpets, etc.).
When I listen to Joanna Newsom, I don’t feel that I’m visiting a high school renaissance fair. Her labyrinthine lyrical structures coupled with her bold vocal delivery feels completely natural — certainly not an affectation. While it would be terribly unfair to fault Helena Costas for not writing songs as great as Newsom, the fact is that her debut album and even persona is being marketed to appeal to Newsom's fans (She’s quirky! It’s a collaboration with a famous producer!). Even without my immediate bias and high expectations, the instrumental additions of Burton are often clumsy or histrionic, the lyrics are mundane, and the impossibly cutesy vocal delivery becomes grating after just a few songs. Indeed, Costas and Danger Mouse will not be getting the last laugh.
1. Worm's Head
2. Jessie the Goat
3. Go Walking
4. Lucid
5. JD Folk Blues
6. The Last Laugh
7. Under the Influence of Jaffa Cakes
8. Jelly Belly
9. Cake and July
10. Chasing Ticking Crocodile
11. Nothing Is Ever What It Seems
12. The Running Goblin
13. The Bull Bites Back
14. Yellow Teapot
More about: Joker's Daughter
