Life Stinks, Then You Sing About It
Dorky Dan Bryk's hard-luck licks

By JIM FARBER


DAN BRYK "LOVER'S LEAP" (SCRATCHIE RECORDS)

Pop has among its ranks a great sorority of lonely, funny women. Singer-songwriters like Jill Sobule, Amy Rigby and Syd Straw often write from a place of romantic disappointment, fired by a special hopelessness men rarely acknowledge or know.

It's not that men — particularly male pop writers — don't hurt or mope. Far from it. It's just that they're more likely to blame their disappointment on a specific love gone wrong rather than on themselves. While rejected women commonly take apart their own lives, men often see themselves simply as victims of bad circumstance.

All of which makes writers like Dan Bryk that much more valuable and rare. He writes from the kind of wretched but funny point of view normally associated with frustrated female songwriters. Unless, of course, it comes from artists who are beyond gender, like Morrissey — who's also beyond help.

Bryk, from Toronto, is, to be blunt, an overweight, self-described geek who has decided to take revenge on the world through well-crafted witty pop songs. A noble tradition! Bitter and proud, Bryk takes no prisoners in his songs, using his anger to write ruthless portraits of often broken people.

Musically, he recalls nerd-pop fetishists like Ben Folds Five, Fountains of Wayne, or They Might Be Giants. He's a fool for melody, though he often performs in the solitary style of a singer-songwriter, creating striking pop-for-one. His voice, a shaky instrument, has an alienated quality, making it the right mouthpiece for socially unsure characters.

Bryk establishes his dork credentials by fashioning the album's first song, "Mark Turmell," as an ode to a pioneer of Apple computers. Apparently, Bryk had few friends growing up but held an intellectual crush on "the best programmer in the whole world." Yeesh!

In "Spadina Expressway," Bryk identifies with an abandoned highway project. "They built around you like you weren't even there," he sings. "I guess they ran out of street/But couldn't run you out of town."

In "Big Things Like This," Bryk is petty enough to bitch about a guy who bullied him as a child, a guy he knows full well has probably amounted to nothing.

Bryk's characters often perpetuate the cruelty inflicted on them. The guy in "Memo to Myself" tells a woman "you probably think we touched souls/All I did was touch you underneath your blouse." The two characters in "The Letter Home" become roommates just so they can share being "boring and bored."

Bryk is far more generous in "Fingers," the tale of a piano teacher and childhood idol who sexually abused him. The man changed Bryk's life by introducing him to Randy Newman records and letting him stay up late, if only to undo his belt. Bryk not only recalls his terror and disillusionment but also the admiration he still holds for the man, and he even expresses an unsettling whimsy for the whole experience.

Apparently, Randy Newman records did make an impression on this guy.

Bryk finds his most sympathetic side in "BBW," an ode to "chunky girls." "When I'm ashamed of my weight/Flirting with pity and self-hate/She plants a kiss upon my lips/And slips her hands across my hips."

Such relief goes a long way toward humanizing an album that verges on the searing. Combined with the harder observations in the other songs, it proves, at last, that men have as much capacity as women for tearing themselves apart.