Indie kid alert! Mostly-slow, mostly-sad male-voxed guitar-and-piano brooders. The adorable album art says it all -- bittersweet k-12 nostalgia. Sad yet cute... but pretty fucking sad. It’s... not really emo, though. It reminds me a lot of Matt Pryor’s (Get Up Kids) solo stuff, or an ‘unplugged’ Say Hi. Vocals somewhere between, I don’t know, Jeff Buckley and AC Newman and Eric Elbogen (Say Hi). I’m shotgunning because it’s really someone more obvious I can’t place. Moody, minimalist, melodic, at times very very pretty. Crushingly so. None of these songs are happy songs. The lyrics are not great, but the point is made. This is my sort of thing, so it hits me. God damn this record makes me feel old.

try: 2, 9, 4, 1
FCC: 5

*1. starts small & slow (~2 sec to sound). minimalist builder with hella ambience and ‘ah’s. mournful melodic two-note guitar and cymbal-heavy drums. low-rent arcade fire, yes, but also effective. ‘we were too busy being exactly where we were at.’
*2. slow sad bells and clear picked hammer-on guitar. picks up into a tight, sad groove. nice electric guitar doubling for the last bit.
3. brushed drums & slow chord piano. super-exposed scratchy raw vox. very doom and gloom. very jeff buckley. muddy, fuzzy, reachy.
*4. simple arpeggiated picked guitar segues into very warm, very lush hand-drum chorus: ‘good old younger days.’ a little bright eyes in this one. goes fuzz/scratch in the last minute.
5. FCC “fucked up” bare-bones acoustic and shakers, along the lines of bright eyes’s ‘lua’. great & sad folky melody.
6. big hymnal vox & jungle drums. picks up into slightly boppy accordion-flanked verses. sad as shit melodic electric guitar carries it out.
7. wtf. 1-min sailor sing-song with hilarious sesame street bells. great fill!
8. handclaps and kid-practice piano. picks up into an upbeat B&S style prance-in-the-park tune. and then there’s the fast & chipper strumming. very cute.
*9. melodic minor electric. sad and tight. ‘oooh’s. accordion. full sound. ‘my friends were my friends you know who i’m talking about, and those others were just kids i would hang around.’
10. heavy somber piano and slow vocals. also slow wall of sound chorus. super reachy. serious jeff buckley action here.
11. church-at-dawn ambience, what sounds like bicycle bells. moves into waltzy piano. fuzzy, swaying, melty.
12. happiest track on the record, and also the lamest. oom-pah-pah accordion carousel fare. pretty syrupy lyrics.