The solo project (with guest appearances) of Jason Boesel, the former drummer of Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes. Nice mood – Boesel’s singing is unaffected, unforced country, vaguely creepy at times, but always exceptional at establishing atmosphere. Imagine you and your slightly jaded friends escaped Stanford and had the run of a Southern beach town for a few months. FCC Clean. Try 1, 2, 4, 7, 11.
1. Slow, strange, creepy and beachy! 2. Mid-tempo, country twang electro-guitar. Catchy chorus. 3. Slow, nostalgic. The song your folks got together to, if they went to college, on a coastal town, in a simpler time. 4. Now your folks smoked a lot of pot, went to college in Arizona, were pseudo-hobos, and recently broke up (but there’s still hope because they’re camping). 5. Cool opening riff. Peter and the Wolf-feel. You just broke up with your girlfriend, aren’t super bitter about it, want to sing her a song anyway, and are good at sounding super cool while also sounding super sincere. 6. Slow boring ballad, begins with awkward oohs. 7. Slow, drawn out words with mid-tempo drums and occasional marvelous guitar riffs. Doesn’t force emotion, but gets it. 8. A middle-aged folk singer’s treatise on the sweet, sweet depression of the slow life, but with speedy drums. Higher bits of chorus sound bizarrely Ben Gibbard-esque. 9. Spare male ballad with weirdly overproduced, catchy chorus. 10. Acoustic “Mr. Jones” with an extremely limited vocabulary. Silly, but the repetition makes it sad. 11. Slow, tender. Find your lover, and a hammock on a porch somewhere. Put on this song. Do what feels comfortable. (Ignore the weird, low, “dang, momma,” at the end.)