A heartwarming and astonishing debut

Posted by Tom Milsom on 11th Nov 2009

Let's start off with a list of things that Hank Green cannot do particularly well. Sing. Play the guitar. Arrange parts (as seen in the tracks Butte Montana and Helena Montana). These are all quite vital musical talents to have, particularly when so many of the tracks on the album are simply guitar and vocals, but there's one thing to bear in mind, and it's this. Hank Green's So Jokes is an album that will have zero appeal to the vast majority of people in the real world. It is written to and for a very niche market of people, nerdfighters, who by and large are forced to eschew the majority of today's music due to its appeal to the mass market - a market that nerdfighters most certainly do not belong to. We cannot possibly judge this on whether or not it is a good album, because to nerdfighters, they will love Hank Green regardless of his singing voice and ability to play the guitar. Heck, Hank Green could punch me in the face over and over again, and I would still love Hank Green.
So, does So Jokes achieve the objective Hank himself sets of making the listener happy?
Well on a skin-deep level, every track is funny in some way, from the very obviously witty and pun-filled 'Accio Deathly Hallows' (which appears on the album a total of four times in different guises - probably a tad OTT considering its total running time of well over an hour) to the calmer, droller humour of subtle standout track 'Luck of my Life', but sometimes even this can get a little grating. In some of his love songs, such as 'Helen Hunt', a pretty ballad that turns out to be about... you guessed it... Helen Hunt, you feel as though he's finally pouring his heart out to you only to find out you've been tricked when he turns it into a big joke at the chorus.
The synth keyboards and cheesy drums are great too - very uplifting, very cheery, very happy. Very simplistic. It's strongly reminiscent of early They Might Be Giants, but with TMBG, there was always a subtle razor blade hidden in the cheese. Here, it's happy happy pretty much throughout. But there are two tracks that are the key to Hank's success at making this an ultimately very good album. The most remarkable track musically is 'Willy's Song', concocted with strange vocal sounds edited together, and with Hank singing his song over the top, with no additional instrumentation. It's a wonderful song, made all the better for Hank's poppy, happy melody he sings, which works so jarringly brilliantly with the almost tribal backing of hums and squeals. If only more tracks had been this inventive, the album would have had much more of the shade it needed to combat all its light.
But lyrically, and in general, the standout track of the album is "Luck of my life', a song written to his wife, where he takes the time to stand back, look at what he's doing, and actually for a tiny moment isn't afraid to pour his heart out. It's almost as if he's placating himself in the rest of the album with lyrics like "Oh yeah, ten thousand people watch me online each week/okay no one's ever had a cooler job than me", and suddenly the whole album becomes a case of 'yeah, Hank can mess about and sing silly songs about books and llamas and Captain Picard, but as he sings, "one day one girl said that she'd be my wife/and that day was the luckiest of my life." This is most certainly an album for people who know Hank Green, and there's no stronger proof of it than that the happiest moment on the album is not when he's trying hard to make us happy, but when he's genuinely happy himself.