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If Napoleon Dynamite recorded an album, it might turn out something like this. Maybe it's the drawings of fantastical beasts on the packaging (no ligers, but still), or maybe it's the album's retro sounds, which remind me of the movie's stuck-in-the-80s production design. Also like the film, the album seems to exist in a nebulous grey area between willfully eccentric irony and genuinely eccentric earnestness, and this indeterminate quality is part of what makes it so interesting.
This disc contains 7 self-produced tracks from bicoastal Canadian Gordon B. Isnor, an idiosyncratic pop songwriter with a penchant for unexpected combinations of acoustic and low-tech electronic sounds. The opening track, "Notorious Double Dippers," starts with flamenco/gypsy guitar, and then the 80s drum machine kicks in with a heavy beat. "Always Come Back" is the first indie-rock song outside of Bob Pollard's output to remind me of Pete Townshend (mostly Pete's 80s solo output, although the "Baba O'Riley" chord progression is in there too). The disc's prettiest track, "Just a Fleeting Thing," features vocoder and a nice cascading electric-piano line. The final 2 tracks take a bit of a trippier turn, from the acoustic folk-prog of "There's a Light" to the title track, a lengthy noodling psychedelic electric-folk song that unfortunately closes out the disc on a bit of an uninteresting note. Sometimes goofy, sometimes lovely, this is an inscrutable and unpredictable disc and I'm mostly pretty charmed by it. (mike.09.05)
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