Driver, one of the city’s greatest treasures and mammon’s sharpest enemies, offers a stripped down piece of advice we could all stand to follow: sometimes you’re doing too much. It’s a critique occasionally applied to his music which can get so layered as to become almost math-rap, the brilliance of Battles with the vertical ascent of a helicopter. Sometimes it’s nice to just let it breathe.
Like all of his best tangents, this can be interpreted into a thousand splinters. For this instance, I’ll interpret “Much” as a tangible reminder of an acronym that a wise old baseball coach and sometime writer had pasted above his typewriter: K.I.S.S. “Keep it simple, stupid.” So Regan Farquhar keeps it refreshingly simple for the third single off Thumb, due Friday on Temporary Whatever/Alpha Pup. He’s smiling, biking, gliding through South LA backyards, surrounded by back-up dancers. He looks like he’s having the most fun in years, the sort of thing happens when you let the stress idle on the back-burner — briefly.
There’s still all the one-line salvos expected from a Busdriver song: “the unemployed black astronauts are out there stripping Hummers.” “I blend electric blues and dress shoes.” Or in a few more bars: “recall the awkward dude that I once was/stretch that swagger into metadata in the rumor mill and now you got your syndicated show and your movie deal.”
He might dislocate his rotator cuff but probably not. After a decade-plus, he’s never needed Tommy John. Nor do producers Mr. Carmack, Kenny Segal and Mike Parvizi of Penthouse Penthouse. This could abrogate the need for you next therapy session, or Driver’s.
