Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele

 Dent May is sharing an inside joke with us. It’s in his dorky, clean-cut innocent look, it’s in the wryly placed, over-the-top stock transitions and green-screen in his Howard video, it’s in his lyrics. The schmaltz is all part of his persona: the ‘shoo-bee-doo-bap’ backing tracks and brass shots liken comparisons to fellow 50’s-pop throwback artists like Jens Lekman or even Beirut, but Dent May’s ironic persona ends up undermining the album’s charm. 

What’s wrong, in a nutshell is the lyrics. His attempts at inside-joke ironic humor fall embarrassingly flat. Lines like “He’s never been to Paris, never to Prague, oh my God!”, from College Town Boy (one of the most awkward tracks) are cringe-worthy. There are more winces to come: on You Can’t Force a Dance Party, he sings, “I’ll be in the corner, reading poetry and prose”, or “Smart people everywhere / but do they know what love is?” from At the Academic Conference. 

Sometimes the lyrics themselves aren’t even particularly bad, but his shtick-y persona makes them seem worse than they are. Indeed, you could chalk up a lot of the album’s shortcomings to its pervasive irony. “Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Mississippi... Howard!”, he booms on Howard. It wouldn’t be so bad if declared on a more honest record, but May seems bent on mocking everything in his path. Sometimes it’s funny. More often, it limits the record to novelty.

There are enough mentions of Paris on this album to suggest that May is pretty emotional about the place, and indeed, Oh Paris!, with lines like “I finally know that I belong here in this world,” is one of the album’s better cuts. It’s just a shame that he has to bury what could be a song with some heart under his showman persona.

He gets it right sometimes, though. Despite what you’d think, the omnipresent ukulele is never noticeable enough to be irritating. Instead, it drops into the background and gives the tracks a sunny feel. The Good Feeling Music... is also a surprisingly diverse album musically: he goes from slide-guitar country on Howard to waltzing ballads to a cover of a 1958 chart-topper. But most significant is how amazingly catchy the album is. Sure, it might be a bit vacuous lyrically, but Dent May sure can write hooks. There’s a reason, after all, that scat background singers were big in the 50’s. I caught myself more than once tapping along (or even bobbing my head) to even the most irritating lyrical tripe. It’s fun, it’s cheerful, sometimes it’s even memorable. If you can forgive the lyrics there’s a lot to love musically. 

The lyrics are bad, yes, but in all but the most grating cases it’s not the lyrics that are the problem. Interpol’s rise to fame has shown that everyone can forgive bad lyrics (honestly, nothing on this album is as bad as lines like “I want your silent parts / the parts the birds love / I know there’s such a place”). The problem is that at least Paul Banks sings with sincerity. When Dent May writes a love song, he sings lyrics like “Please don’t break my heart come summer / it would be such a bummer”. It compromises the impact of what might have been heartfelt falsetto lines like “I’m going to love you for all time”. So, yeah. Dent May’s a showman, and his music videos are generally more entertaining than the songs themselves. It could be a fun and engaging act. Maybe he’ll hone his craft for his next record. I sincerely hope so: he’s got too much talent not to.