Ed’s Redeeming Qualities inhabits a netherworld between artful design and inartful execution. They’re basically a folk band, but they don’t really sing ballads, have no use for their musical predecessors, and occasionally pep up a song with a distorted electric guitar. They have the sensibility of a rock band–a smarty-pants college-type rock band–but who ever heard of a rock band with ukulele, violin, and bongos as lead instruments, a rock band that rhymes “tube socks” with “Clorox,” a rock band that has accomplished the extraordinary literary hat trick of having all of its members published in Gordon Lish’s Quarterly?
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The band’s name refers to Ed (who doesn’t exist) and his habit of stacking the dishes after he washes them and sometimes saying what he thinks, according to a short poem on the back of the group’s T-shirts. Ed’s redeeming qualities, it turns out, are the band members’ as well: they are rather orderly in their manner, and they too attempt to say what’s on their minds–with impressive lyrical ability.
The album that resulted, More Bad Times, was a warped, witty, and sometimes moving exposition of modern alternative folk rock: what seem at first to be novelty songs wend their way deep into your subconscious, where they twist and turn and finally take on deeper meanings. In this way, “Lawn Dart” becomes an epic, “A Little Thing” an emotional holocaust, and the title track a love song for the ages.
