After years of blurring
the line between his two bands, singer Tim Kinsella seems to have settled on a
definition of each: Joan Of Arc is his studio project, and Make Believe is his
rock group. He's muddying that border again, though, by taking Joan Of Arc on
tour in support of his two new releases, Joan Of Arc's Boo! Human and Make Believe's Going
To The Bone Church.
That shouldn't come as a surprise to Kinsella's small but devoted fan base.
He's long been a puzzling, even gleefully perverse songwriter. Not that there's
a hell of a lot of glee in Kinsella's catalogue. Boo! Human is perhaps the angriest
record of his career—and, contrarian that he is, he's cloaked bitter
barbs in gorgeous, sprawling art-rock. Lush and nauseatingly spacious, Boo!
Human is
a tough listen that just gets tougher. But the window Kinsella opens into his
bruised soul almost reads like a mea culpa, some twisted kind of penitence for
two decades of cryptic, evasive lyrics. (It still stays oh-so-slightly cryptic
and evasive, of course.)