One of these “other ways” has been to adopt femininity as a pose. If punk rock, as Calvin Johnson once said to me, is all about posing, then why not do away with the Sid Vicious nihilistic boy-punk pose and embrace the feminine? In addition to Calvin and sensitive-but-only-half-seriously-sensitive boys like him, female dominated groups like Talulah Gosh and Heavenly, Cub, the aforementioned Tiger Trap, and, in more recent years, Gentle Waves have embraced clichés of femininity with great success. How Television Personalities stand out is their refusal of gender clichés — I am reminded again of X Ray Spex and their “I am a Cliché.” Songs like “Games for Boys” and “Geoffrey Ingram” deal with a profound alienation from traditional gender roles but, for Treacy, the alternative is not to adopt the opposite gender role. That too would be alienating. Just as he finds another way to “mean it” when presented with Joe Strummer’s barking, working class hero pose, Treacy finds a way to avoid playing Joe Strummer that doesn’t involve sitting cross-legged and knitting like sensitive boys are still doing in the Pacific Northwest (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

In the beginning, Television Personalities’ music was as indebted to the softer strains of British Psychedelia and the Kinks as it was to punk rock. Treacy’s singing style has always been most of all reminiscent of We are the Village Green Preservation Society-era Ray Davies. As Treacy, like his idol Syd Barrett, went further and further off the deep end, both artistically and in his personal life, Television Personalities songs went from neat little self-contained pop songs to meandering, unfocused compositions. They were, to be sure, still pop songs, but with the sense that Treacy was making it up as he went along. The difficulty of these songs, then, was not so much in their structure (like, for example, the difficulty of the Fiery Furnaces) but in their complete lack of structure. Which brings us, finally, to My Dark Places.

While Television Personalities have been making an aesthetic of releasing overly long and unfocused albums since the early 90’s, there’s something of Daniel Johnston and another album recently released by Domino, the reissue of Sebadoh III, in My Dark Places. It would be altogether too simple to attribute the constant threat of falling apart in My Dark Places to Dan Treacy’s loosened tether to mental clarity. Critics often make a virtue of the less coherent aspects of Daniel Johnston’s work for this very reason. For these condescending critics, there is an “honesty” to Johnston’s songs because, as a schizophrenic, he doesn’t know any better; he’s an accidental “genius,” an idiot savant. But, to be fair, these guys are extremely bright artists who know what they’re doing. No more than Van Gogh’s paintings were a product of his madness, My Dark Places is not a document of Treacy’s on 5″ disc. (Did anyone accuse the Beatles of schizophrenia after the White Album? It was, after all, Brian Wilson, he of the groundbreakingly unified and self-contained Pet Sounds, who suffered from schizophrenia.) Rather, we should understand the schizophrenic nature of My Dark Places as part of a project to reconceptualize what it means to create an album.

While reports have it that Treacy is indeed still off his nut, what we encounter on My Dark Places is a character’s struggle with narrative coherence. Treacy keeps inserting outside voices to disrupt his (character’s) narrative and, at many points in My Dark Places, the listener is made to ask, “Who is speaking?” The answer? To quote Foucault quoting Beckett (who is speaking indeed), “What does it matter who is speaking?” Which is to say that the album asks us why we seek coherence in albums; what do we gain from being able to imagine a stable figure behind the songs? My Dark Places enacts this working through of narrative coherence in the album through this character, this disembodied voice onto which we as listeners project a backstory, and his attempt to sing songs that not only appear constantly on the verge of falling apart but whose backup singers often go from backing him up to talking to him, confronting him, and destroying him.

And the music? The greatness of the Replacements’ Let it Be, it has often been said, was that it captured a volatile band always on the brink of falling apart. My Dark Places is a far cry from the Replacements, to be sure. What we get, though, is sixteen great pop songs that could very well, had Television Personalities the inclination, sound like a Cinerama album. What makes these songs interesting, however, is the way the band plays with them, subverting the listener’s conventional enjoyment of the songs. I have already mentioned the way the backup vocals turn against and subsequently undo the album’s narrator. On “Velvet Underground,” the band builds the song, whose lyrics are about the originality of the Velvet Underground’s music, around the kind of standard pre-programmed rockabilly bassline you would normally find on a Casio keyboard, only, instead of incorporating Casiotone as many faux-naïf pop bands are content to do, the band plays the bassline and stock drumbeat using an actual bass guitar and drums. On the title track, the band sings “My dark places, my dark places,” presumably the emotional center of the album, to the tune of “Frère Jacques,” blocking the listener’s emotional identification with the singer, who isn’t really even singing his own song. The final track, “There’s No Beautiful Way to Say Goodbye,” an affecting piano ballad, is subverted throughout with intentionally unsophisticated keywork until, toward the end of the song, the piano fades out as Treacy engages in a desperate lovesick rant.