Bicycle Thief
“My mom thinks I need religion,” croaks Bob Forrest. “I think I need a shower and something to eat.” That deadpan statement comes from “Boy at a Bus Stop,” a sparse, static song whose title distances it from autobiography even as its down-and-out detail drags it back again. Forrest is a denizen of Los Angeles, a 38-year-old indie rock hanger-on who hasn’t been heard from since his previous band, Thelonious Monster, breathed its last in 1992. “I don’t know that I have one single friend,” he laments, though his loneliness may simply be the price of mistaking selfishness for radical individualism. You Come and Go Like a Pop Song, the first release by his new band, the Bicycle Thief, wavers between unconcealed spite and blubbering apology for 12 tracks before that boy at the bus stop concludes, “I know nothing’s ever gonna be OK again nohow.” Reflexive nihilism–the last refuge of the scoundrel too stubborn to sink to prayer. Throughout his career, this flirtation with fatalism has both sharpened and sabotaged Forrest’s art.
