THE LEG UP: One-Sided Story

ONE-SIDED STORY: The Pursuit of Happiness

I was fairly obsessed with the Pursuit of Happiness for a couple of months during eighth grade, when it wasn’t uncommon to catch “I’m an Adult Now” on late-night MTV. Seriously, what dorky small-town eighth-grader wouldn’t be? Coming across like Weird Al’s id backed by the Violent Femmes ego, the Toronto band assayed smart, smart-ass lyrics about getting girls, not “getting” girls, and getting girls to do certain things, which are typically the three thoughts crowding any thirteen-year-old’s mind. So when I found the band’s 1990 album One Sided Story in the dollar bin, I was simultaneously elated (oh cool! I haven’t heard this band in nearly twenty years) and crushed (oh shit! I’m old).

One Sided Story is the lesser Pursuit of Happiness album, the confused follow-up to their 1988 debut, Love Junk. Todd Rundgren’s production sounds overly polished and flat, with Moe Berg’s vocals too low in the mix and the guitars defanged. And some of Berg’s songs sound a little too ungenerous (“Something Physical”) or too conceptual (“New Language”). Still, it’s hard to deny his angsty hook on “Two Girls in One” or the cocksure boy-girl exchange “The One Thing,” and Berg could write a sharp, witty lyric, whether he’s chasing an absurd comparison (“Your love is like greasy fried noodles...”) or making himself the butt of the joke (“Sometimes I go too far / The girls think I’m icky / They can see the boner in my pants”). One Sided Story is a hard album to love, even harder to hate, which pretty much sums up the relationships Berg’s singing about.

Despite their clever singles, this band was never going to be your life. But they had a vision of how rock and roll needs to sound—tense, lusty, rejected, dejected, smart, and hopelessly, darkly adolescent—and the clarity with which they pursued it means One Sided Story never sounds as dated as you would expect.

Stephen M. Deusner is a freelance music journalist based in Washington , DC. Don't ask him about Norwegian pop or house rabbits, unless you have a few hours.