Bobby Conn has a well-earned reputation for messing with journalists. He’s gone to great lengths over the years to convince them that he really is, say, a self-mutilating ex-convict or a professional business-seminar speaker or the Antichrist. So when the notoriously flamboyant singer-songwriter-provocateur answers the door of his Humboldt Park home wearing a faded button-up and glasses, invites me into a living room filled with toddlers’ toys, and proceeds to introduce the adorable silver-haired couple in the corner as his parents, I have to wonder briefly if this is another gag.
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Since going solo after the 1994 breakup of his neoprog band Condeucent, the elfin Conn has developed a persona drawing heavily on the psych-opera theatrics of Arthur Brown and the ribald excesses of filmmaker Ken Russell and backed it with a 70s-leaning melange of glam, bubblegum, metal, funk, and punk. The mix has always gone down better overseas: his last album, 2002’s squalid, sex-obsessed The Golden Age, made a fan of David Bowie, who chose Conn to perform as part of the annual Meltdown festival in London.
Somewhere in there, though, Conn found time to write and record his fourth full-length. A sustained indictment of the American empire, The Homeland (Thrill Jockey) is a full-fledged concept album–continuing a tradition best known for its low points, from the Moody Blues’ symphonic snoozer Days of Future Passed to Kiss’s career-shattering goth opera Music From “The Elder.” “But that’s what I love about concept records,” says Conn. “They’re generally so ill-advised and rarely ever coherent or consistent all the way through. Most start out pretty solid, get lost along the way, and then try and tie it all together at the end–which is kind of what I did. But I love that too. I love when bands really reach for the brass ring and just don’t quite get it.”
The Gypsies determinedly test the boundaries of good taste throughout the album, particularly Ruecker, who overloads the mutant-disco groove of “Cashing Objections” with his epic mock-metal shredding, and Sweets, whose piano flourishes give “We’re Taking Over the World” a prog grandiosity that Styx might find excessive.
