Dark-themed one-man-band indie pop

Smith’s latest is the best sort of homemade, project-studio indie pop. The arrangements of guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards are more like songwriter demos than polished major-label product, leaving the one-man-band productions focused on Smith’s voice and lyrics. There are some novel instrumental touches, such as the retro-organ on “This is Not a Tragedy” and the moody low-string guitar on “Santa Cruz,” but they never upstage Smith’s lyrical mood. The edginess and experimentation of the backing sounds is similar to Smith’s previous release, Neil Avenue, but the subject matter skips past the jokiness of earlier works like “Girls With the Glasses” to darker, more imagination-driven places. Smith faces the mental fallout of a damaged relationship on the opening “Good Intentions” and the more dire consequences of a car crash on “Following the Ambulance Home.” Less accidental is the jilted groom of “Santa Cruz” whose downward spiral is documented from the bottom up with the clever lyrical device “you ain’t heard the worst of it yet.” The darkness turns to a wail with the title track’s mourning of a lost spouse, leaving the album’s only semi-bright spot as the half-hearted invitation in “A Few Hundred Miles.” Eric Broz has suggested Smith’s broken-hearted lyrics bring to mind Paul Westerberg (as does the reediness of Smith’s voice), but there’s a spooked emotion in these stories that edges past hurt, and it’s magnified by the discomforting nearness of Smith’s confessional style. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

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