[by Nathan Means]

The Wedding Present's David Gedge wrote his most recent album while living in Los Angeles, but references to the Santa Ana Winds and Winona Rider don't suggest any real change in his thematic obsessions; El Rey could be subtitled “Getting Dumped in Los Feliz.”

This is not a slight. Gedge's handles heartache, temptation and love-as-catastrophe as deftly as anyone - themes that are also about the closest I can imagine to transcendent. Likewise, Gedge should be attracted to a place where celebrity heartache and brief, disastrous relationships are feverishly chronicled. But aside from El Rey 's one funny and thematically LA-centric moment – a man sings to photographs of an actress, “When I stare at you/ OK, it's just a .jpg… I've got a few” - LA doesn't really matter. Gedge could have spent a few months in Baghdad and – in the midst of bombings and power outages – successfully dredged the same waters he has since The Wedding Present's first album over 20 years ago.

Of course, with The Wedding Present, not much has ever mattered besides Gedge, who is always portrayed as a stubborn, gritty Yorkshire man. While his contemporaries “came to terms”, he plowed ahead with an unshakable faith in his music and an unending attraction to lust's crushing pendulum. Neatly, Gedge's lyrical obsessions were tempered by his earthy, bludgeoning Leeds accent and his incredibly unlyrical surname. (Notice how “Gedge” only rhymes with similarly grey words like hedge, ledge, dredge?)

However, over the past five or so years, Gedge's Northern muddying of words has cleared a bit. This could be attributed to some sort of internationalization of accent, but I prefer to think that Gedge is actually forcing himself to enunciate more clearly out of stubbornness - that a more generalized pronunciation is in line with his insistence that words still matter. As text messages whiz past, El Rey is an album that demands your attention; you will not enjoy it without listening to the words and Gedge is still immensely talented at pairing otherwise ordinary lines together (That's when I pretend/ I don't have a girlfriend) in a way that produces catchy, sometimes chilling choruses. As perhaps part of this same effort, his voice is mixed much more clearly and louder than it was on earlier albums.

The problem with Gedge carrying on passionately (and now clearly) about betrayals of the heart and flesh is that everything outside the margins of his singing seems superfluous. This includes El Rey 's few useless instrumental jams meant as preludes or codas of songs and, at times, even the band itself.

Previous incarnations of The Wedding Present handled this by becoming an adrenalized blur cacophonously hovering behind Gedge's voice. Now the band (and probably Gedge) have slowed down a bit, sometimes calling too much attention to the dated guitar layers. The Wedding Present are at their best when they stay out of Gedge's way and songs end quickly after Gedge delivers his last gorgeously barbed chorus. Fortunately, El Rey sticks to this formula most of the time.

April 25, 2008