Illustration titled "Agnes Meditates on Heavenly Things" from The Life of Saint Agnes by Helen Walker Homan, 1938
After a string of excellent solo albums, including 2008's Yes Boss (one of my favorite albums of the last decade), New York songwriter Graham Smith has resurrected the Kleenex Girl Wonder monicker of his rambunctious youth. This time, though, Kleenex Girl Wonder (or Klccncx Girl Wonder, as the cover says for trademark reasons, I'm sure) is an actual band, including former Get Him Eat Him frontman Matt LeMay on Drums. LeMay also used to work for Pitchfork, and the Secret Thinking liners cheekily include a scan of a very negative LeMay review of one of the early Kleenex Girl Wonder records.
Even though Smith has organized an actual band this time around, the sound of Secret Thinking doesn't depart too much from the sound of Smith's recent solo records. The songs that make up Secret Thinking keep to Smith's standard pairing of dense wordplay set to standard indie-rock arrangements. The acidic invective of Yes Boss is long gone, though - now, the lyrics have a more playful, laid-back and, at times, even celebratory feel to them. This means that the songs lack some of the stinging rawness that Smith does so well, but the songwriting is strong and the hooks come through.
The weak spot on Secret Thinking is "Does Your Back Hurt?", which inadvisedly has a guitar lead play along to the vocal melody, a trick that rarely works unless you're the Shaggs. The highlights include the album's single "Thanks!...for the Emotional Disease", which is not as bitter as it sounds, and the solo/acoustic track "You Know You Want It, Anyway You Can Get It", which is just crazy bitter. The album also ends with a string of four very pleasing songs, including the internal-rhyme-and-wordplay-playground title track, so that Secret Thinking makes for a very pleasing (if short at thirty minutes) listen.
"Thanks!...for the Emotional Disease" by Kleenex Girl Wonder
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