Ba Da Bing
2001
For Him And The Girls
About This Album
For Him & the Girls is an incredibly self-assured debut, precisely what makes it so auspicious and part of what makes it flawed. The collection is wildly diverse and exciting, produced by a 24-year-old wunderkind entirely at his home studio and on which he plays almost all the instruments himself. Hawksley Workman's scope of imagination alone is remarkable for its outrageous and acrobatic eccentricities. Even the weaker moments are loaded with ideas and queer paths that he didn't feel the need to follow up on. But Workman can sound like daydreamer one minute, an undiluted genius the next. Or he can simply sound too cute for his own good. Workman's ambitions occasionally get the best of his editing process. This is particularly the case with some of his words. He definitely knows how to turn a nifty phrase. His lyrics frequently come off literate, loopy, and even poetic, sometimes all three in the same line ("You've got pies in the oven all across the sea," he sings on "Bullets," a bewitching ode written about a World War II-era photograph of his grandparents). He is capable of tossed-off epiphanies of surprising poignancy, but he also throws in a few that simply sound tossed-off, such as the chorus on the opening "Maniacs," otherwise a vehicle for Workman's astounding flights of falsetto.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,8,10 and 13)

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