Craig Wedren - Baby Review

First, a caveat:Know that this reviewer counts Pony Express Record, the sublimely bizarre 1994 release by Craig Wedren’s old band Shudder to Think, among his favorite albums. Know also that fandom of the hall-of-mirrors arena rock on said masterpiece doesn’t translate for all admirers into unconditional love for the band’s whole catalog. Some fans consider the band’s evolution from melodic D.C. hardcore to Pony Express Record a completed journey, a move from one uncompromising aesthetic to a more complex, but no less compromising, one. To these fans, the band’s final album, the user-friendly 50,000 B.C., and its later chameleonic soundtrack work are unfortunate postscripts. To others, the post-Pony Express Record works are further stops on the trip that shifted the emphasis from the reconfiguring of rock tropes to an open-minded embrace of them. I’m a fan of the second type, and this perspective may be critical to truly appreciate Baby, the only album by Wedren’s post-Shudder group, originally released in 2004 and now remastered, reissued, and bonus track-equipped. Here, Wedren and his NYC-based band customize his emergent glam and power-pop impulses with heavy electronic flourishes and a sexy, silly, fun aesthetic.


You might not guess it from the solo albums Wedren put out after the original release of Baby — the obliquely confessional Lapland (2005), a collection of ‘90s experiments as The Spanish Amnesian (2009), and the hit-and-miss Wand (2011) — but “fun” has been the operative word for much of Wedren’s career of late. For the last decade, he’s spent a lot of his time doing soundtrack work, mostly for comedies and often for The State alum David Wain, whose Paul Rudd/Jennifer Aniston vehicle, Wanderlust, features Baby’s “Get Your Body”, prompting the album’s re-release.


The expansion and remastering are nice, but the re-release is welcome enough in itself, since it was so easy to miss this band the first time around. Despite being together from 2001 to 2004, Baby seldom played outside of New York City, and the album mostly flew under the radar even for fans of Wedren’s other work. Which may be just fine, because, as good as the songs may have sounded at the time, the years have been kind to them. Since 2004, artists from Ke$ha to ex-Fall Out Boy singer Patrick Stump have done their part to acclimate the charts to overdriven dance-pop/guitar rock hybrids of which Baby sometimes sounds like a prescient, loving deconstruction....full text So. Craig Wedren is Baby. And his upcoming release is called Baby. But it's not a NEW release, it came out in 2004 and he's just re-releasing it. He has a song featured on the upcoming DVD release of David Wain's Wanderlust, which Craig/Baby scored.
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I love David Wain and for that reason alone I listened to the album. It's got this summery punky disco 90's sound that kind of reminds me of Head Automatica in some tracks and Len in others.
To be honest it's exactly what I would have loved back in 2004. In 2012 I like it, but I don't love it.
The times, they have a'changed.
Still, I can see this album getting mighty popular, again, so you might as well download this free song so you can be hip and cool and in the know when people start to talk about it. ...full text