“Know Better Learn Faster”
from the album Know Better Learn Faster
2009
iTunes
Kicking off Thao Nguyen’s new release, Know Better Learn Faster, is the rabble-rouser, “The Clap,” featuring Nguyen and backers The Get Down Stay Down shouting, “If this is how you want it, Okay! Okay!”
Ready to please, the Bay Area alt-folkster delivers a one-two punch with following tracks “Cool Yourself” and the husky “When We Swam,” which recall the bubbly syncopations of her crowd-pleasing 2008 release, We Brave Bee Stings and All.
Here, Nguyen is back in upbeat, noodling guitar form, with her pen still finding emotive weight in lyrics like, “we have sad sex” and “sad people dance too.” She harps upon sadness, yet rarely ventures into emo territory. Even seeming bitter questions are leavened by bright musicality, with Nguyen’s demands on “Body,” “What am I just a body in your bed?”
Yes. There’s a lot of sex on Know. It’s a departure from Bee Stings, which brimmed over with references to childhood. The change can be felt in the “sad sex” that seems to make singers shout “hey hey!” on “Goodbye Good Luck” and in the anti-Nelly invocation of “Trouble Was For” that demands that “everybody put their clothes back on!”
The album’s randiness is coupled with a musicality that mimics the highs and lows of the act itself. Tracks like “Oh No” and “But What of Strangers” seem to murmur in a post-coital glow, interspersed between tracks like “Burn You Up,” and the stylistic standout “Easy,” which get playfully down and dirty.
Nguyen’s plenty comfortable talking about elbow-in-side topics, but even when she’s just humming along to her own guitar parts or playing call and response to drum fills, her music has an easy happiness that is willing to acquiesce to how we “want it” with a giddy, “Okay! Okay!”