Aaron Lee Tasjan - Get Over It, Underdog
Bee Delores reviews Aaron Lee Tasjan's latest, Get Over It, Underdog. Tasjan gets at the core of our collective tensions, Delores writes, but the album could have used some editing.
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Aaron Lee Tasjan has flawlessly written about life and death, in all their forms, throughout his career. From 2016's Silver Tears to Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! (2021), he's woven delicate and haunting stories into the fabric of the cosmos. He sharpens his lyrical pen upon a well-used whetstone that still carries in his back pocket. It comes as an utter shock, then, that Tasjan's new album, Get Over It, Underdog, tepidly bounces around from trite phrases and arrangements that lazily attempt to evoke a sense of emotional urgency. But its half-hearted jangle shakes loose nothing but cobwebs.
Get Over It, Underdog does carry four bright spots, though. "Science Friction" sets a hypnotic, psychedelic tone for the record, an electric supernova with blustery strings and an apt observation that reality is just science fiction repackaged. "When wealth dictates control, ideas no longer flow," sings Tasjan. "The dam that builds up is surely gonna blow."
That lyrical, well, friction continues with "Clown Show," an expansive yet intimate remark on the general bafoonery of the current state of the world. From Elon Musk to Trump in the White House to trolls on the internet using AI to see what they look like as fruit, existence as we know it is dead. "Company men with artificial intelligence juggle the fate of the world for the hell of it," Tasjan regards from increasing distance. "Sit with me on top of the Elephant/ From up here, it’s all self-evident."
The 11-track album fades quickly, aimless and dreary, before arriving back to Earth with the acoustic, star-speckled "No One's Gonna Know." Tasjan whispers with a forked tongue. "You get away with what you can get away with," he lets the words faintly escape his lips, confident so. He wraps up these words in a bed of rose-tinted strings and other celestial bodies that feed an overwhelming sense of relief, calm, and acceptance.
Get Over It, Underdog goes out roaring with the closing song, "The Dream Comes True." Fragile, broken piano keys warble beneath Tasjan's magnetic lead vocal, perhaps the best moment on the record. "Broken believer, underdog dreamer, fallen angel of love / A smoke ring halo in the neon bar glow is all I've known of heaven above," he admits, as he looks around at his life and sees things plain as day. "I followed a dream into the deep, but all I could think of was you 'cause the living between chasing the dream, that's the dream come true."
That statement patters inside the album. All you have to do is dig through the surprisingly tired lyrical nets Tasjan casts and the arrangements that dog-paddle muddy waters, and you get a much clearer sense of the singer-songwriter intent. But 11 songs meander, almost bobbing in and out of consciousness, and never seem to stick. Perhaps it would have worked far better as an EP.
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