American comedian and musician, Kyle Gordon released his third album, “Kyle Gordon is Everywhere,” last Friday, Oct. 2.
Produced by music industry veteran Jamie Siegel, Gordon’s third comedy album includes 14 tracks riffing and satirizing popular music trends from the 1950s to the 2010s.
The first song isn’t a song, per say, but an “Introduction,” featuring Daniel Radcliffe — moonlighting as a musicologist in residence at the Center for Musical Pretension.
Radcliffe sets the scene for this LP, calling it a collection of “10 of the most significant, compelling, and amusing songs from the last 100 years” curated by historian and archivist, Doctor Kyle H. Gordon. However, there are only nine songs on this album since the rest are Radcliffe interludes, which give factoids about the songs before and after each interlude.
The opening track, “Mr. Jambo,” blew up online because of the aloof and ignorant persona Gordon puts on as Barry Bergen, and pokes fun at how patronizing Bergen is to the subject of the song, a South African man he calls Mr. Jambo.
The next song is “If You Break Up with Me,” where Gordon is the lead singer of a fictional 90s grunge band named 10 Year Plan. The joyous moody and bright melody masks the darker lyrics underneath, where the singer threatens to blow up Danbury Mall unless his ex gets back with him. In the interlude following this track, Radcliffe says, “It is this elegant balancing act between happy music and demented lyrics that came to define the band.”
The second single, “I’m a Whore,” is a parody of the indie sleaze songs that came out in the early 2010s. The music video makes the synth-pop look like something that should be played on a good night out, although the midtempo production fails to live up to the hype; the song certainly shines through its more crude and explicit lyrics of the dance songs it’s referring to.
In a total 180, the next song is “Hero of Fallujah.” A parody of the rock music that came out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, this song pairs dark, brooding instrumentation with its best attempt at uplifting lyrics, as Gordon puts on his deepest voice to project “and you must protect her/ protect your daughter/ and by daughter I mean Uncle Sam.”
After an interlude came “Freak Out,” which emulates the same year as the song before. Fellow comedian Audrey Trullinger provided the singing voice for Disney star Mae Haven Thompson, an Avril Lavigne clone, who sings boisterous pop-punk about boys, school and parents.
The next song is called “Horniest Kid in School,” a homage to 1950s love songs, with Gordon portraying teen idol Eddie O’Dell. In true 50s fashion, O’Dell says he “never felt so gay” while singing about breasts. It might also be the best genre rendition here just for the doo-wop chorus.
After the final interlude, we are met with the two weakest songs on the track list. While “We Are the Zorg” pokes fun at the inane terminology present in sci-fi narratives, it presents no earworm or catchy hook to make it stick. “Blasphemy” takes a shot against goth and post-punk bands, but it sounds like a weaker version of “If You Break Up with Me,” and is too moody for my taste, but maybe that’s the point.
This album ends off on a congratulatory track, “Congratulations.” Here, Gordon spoofs the disco and funk bands of the 70s to create a jubilant final track to celebrate anyone who made it through the last thirty minutes. The bridge even has Gordon show off his rapping skills, as he tries to emulate “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang.
With “Kyle Gordon is Everywhere,” he has fun poking at the excesses of each genre and showing off his songwriting talent through all the genre pastiches. But the lyrics bring down the experience for me, either for being a bit trite or too explicit and turning me off from the whole song. Overall, this is the strongest 7/10 album I’ve listened to in a while, check it out.
Rating: 3.5/5