“Step right up!” — it’s the perfunctory call of carnival hucksters and scam artists; almost a dare. It’s also sometimes a sincere invitation to see something extraordinary, as is the case with the title of Jeffery Straker’s album— he’s definitely got something to show.

I say “show” because of the visual quality of the songs. There’s so much energy and fun here the effect is almost psychedelic, like being drunk on a rainbow. A set of wickedly theatrical piano-driven chamber pop songs, Step Right Up is in every jubilant note a manifesto of escape and an ode to individuality, while never making the mistake of romanticizing it beyond good sense. It’s tough not to fit in; something this stylized pianist (with a vocal delivery as much influenced by cabaret as pop music) hailing from a rural Saskatchewan farm town– population 250– must know a little something about. He’s a little Billy Joel, a little Elton John, and a little Liza Minnelli thrown into a pop blender.

These are feel-good songs to some extent, but that’s not giving them enough credit– they’re more complicated than that. From the poignant and clever tale of the outcast-in-her-own-skin protagonist of “Flat Lines” to the hallelujah chorus of the coming-out anthem “Tykie’s Comin’ Out” and many points between, the overall mood of the production is both rapturous and conciliatory: no matter how excited you may feel about the personal epiphanies that seem to burst about you like fireflies in the dark, there are difficult truths everywhere. Mania dives into depression. Joy wilts into melancholy. To truly connect with someone means covering a great distance—whether it’s physical or emotional— and sometimes there’s nothing fun about individuality; it can feel like combat. In Straker’s songs there are images of splintering closet doors, furious butterflies and powerful storms. He seems plenty aware that you have to make difficult choices and sacrifices; you have to buck a lot of trends; you have to fight the flow. It’s easy to feel that conflicted as a person and not be able to pull it off in a song, but Straker manages it with elegance.

He grinningly sidesteps banality and crafts lyrics that are neither bored nor boring. On the contrary, most every song is a quirky narrative containing fully-formed characters and often summoning striking images. Pretty much every line in “Flat Lines” is a gem, but equally good is “Special K,” a wicked minor-key waltz whose details shimmer with time begone sadness; in this song, the world has moved on around the characters and they seem to be caught in its trivial details, while in their minds they are still dancing martially to the tune of a life long gone. The song’s story takes place in the aisles of a grocery store, and there are so many interesting things happening– listen to how the lyrics and music intertwine, taking and giving cues like long-practiced dancers– that the overall effect is like coming in late to a play that’s in its third act: the characters are established and living, remembering and reacting to whatever love and betrayal has come before, and all is suggested in images: a drag queen caught out in the rain. Recalling the salty taste of a past lover’s skin while seeing him in present time looking not-so-attractive as remembered. It’s bitter magic.

But like trying to keep up with a manic-depressive friend, it can be taxing to traverse the mood swings across the album– and there are many. A concise example of that can be found in the story that weaves the album together. It’s about the process of meeting someone over the internet, and it’s diced up into a trio of piano-vocal songs and spread over the album; in “Bookmark” we listen to the narrator wearily read over what could be someone’s eHarmony profile while at the same time nursing a recent heartbreak. We go onward to a giddy-yet-tentative back-and-forth as the pair meet online in “Emoticons,” and arrive finally at their face-to-face dinner in a restaurant on “Dressed to Kill.” The way this story (and the album) concludes is bittersweet and comical, but unfortunately, it’s also somewhat of a downer. It’s as if the narrator has set himself up for disappointment by submitting to the whims of mania, being blown around like dandelion fluff in a stiff wind. It’s not that you can’t have all these moods together under one roof; it’s that ending the album on that note makes the listener feel like there may be no one at the controls of the roller coaster mentioned back in the sunshiney first track, “Hypnotized.” Are we individuals controlling our destinies, or victims of our own machinations? Maybe this is a complaint that’s too weighty for a pop album, but when you commit to going along on such a lively journey as this one, you kind of want to end on an upswing and not in a hollow. The songs overall are so likable that you want to finish the trip cheering— not wondering.

Nonetheless, this is a great listen– with energy, images and nimble keys, Jeffery Straker puts on a hell of a show; step right up, indeed.

www.jeffstraker.com

This post is tagged Jeffery Straker, Step Right Up