Sam Bisbee

Son of a Math Teacher

(Le Grand Magistery)

Record Review by Alex Pudlin

Attention Shonda Rhimes and the entire Grey's Anatomy production team, I have all the music for your next three episodes: Sam Bisbee’s Son of a Math Teacher. It’s been awhile since I’ve heard an album so ripe for the TV show picking. Whether it’s Mr. Bisbee rocking out with lyrics about love and crashed planes (“Goodbye”) or fearing his own demise (“Verge of Extinction”), Son of a Math Teacher is song after song of perfect underscores for doctors walking, villains looking over the carnage they’ve wreaked and tortured teens staring at pictures of sensitive homecoming queens. And indeed, FX’s Damages has already used two songs from the album!

Most of Bisbee’s songs here deal with love and usually not in the positive sense. I wonder what Bisbee’s doing wrong with the women because a song like “Never Fall in Love” sort of says it all. Here we have a Stars-esque girl/guy duet with tambourine click-clicks and drum rolls. This one’s for the scene with the guy rushing through traffic to meet the girl at the airport before her plane takes off. “This is the Day” is Bisbee at his most vulnerable. A piano and string rock-a-bye underneath a broken man. When Bisbee sings “this is the way” in a gentle nearly-cracking falsetto, you want to just reach into the stereo and give this guy some gummy bears. And although “Vermont” contains a tired reference to the Lower East Side and a melody that sounds a lot like Radiohead’s “Lucky,” it’s a pleasant mid-tempo number with some lovely slide guitar and piano flourishes. I’m a sucker for slides, what can I say?

But then the album takes a turn. “Oxygen” is a G. Love rip-off that features self-consciously clever lyrics like, “in heaven will we still need cell phones?” and the refrain of “throw your hands up in the oxygen and wave them around like you just don’t understand.” Until this point Son of a Math Teacher is a generic but highly listenable album. But after “Oxygen” the train continues to stall. “Letter B” is another “look Ma, I’m clever” track with lyrics about breakdancing and other things that begin with B, while “Ringtone” is a second cellphone shout-out that has a melody very similar to the previously swiped melody on “Vermont.”

Things return to glory on the last few numbers as Bisbee’s instrumentation simplifies to just a guitar on the weepy country-tinged ballad “You Me We and Us” and then further to a vocals-only duet with Lucy Wainwright Roche on the too-short album closer “Close to Me.”  The strong first and last third further highlight just how much of a drag the middle of the album is. Taken as a whole, Son of a Math Teacher may be able to provide plenty of moments for your favorite hit show, but as a whole album, its poor structure just can’t be overlooked.