The throughline of Brad Laner's motley, three-decade long career, which includes dozens of releases under an array of monikers, is his resourceful use of electronic textures. As guitarist for the overlooked 1990s band Medicine-- the first American group signed to UK label Creation-- he used a four-track recorder as a distortion pedal. As Electric Company, he crafted intricate, jarring IDM from bits of music and found sound. Now, with the release of what he calls his "first proper solo album", Laner has made his own version of a psychedelic folk-rock record, drawing upon his affinities for dense, layered compositions and shape-shifting song structures, in the process quietly slipping into 2007's sunny electro-psych-revival with Caribou and Panda Bear.
Neighbor Singing opens by announcing in no uncertain terms where Laner's muse has taken him. First track "Find Out" is a well-executed raga-rock pastiche that liberally quotes the frantic guitar work and hymnal vocalizing of the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" while foregrounding Laner's own busy, blissed-out serenity. "Out Cold" follows, a spacey hodgepodge of hallucinatory country-folk held together by Laner's preternaturally calm melisma. Next is the boundless, drifting "Lovely World", which seems to have taken its titular inspiration from an astronaut's perspective.
Mirroring the trajectory of his own career, Neighbor's focus can wander a bit, and many songs don't take a shape as much as coalesce around a flickering sensation. A case in point is the all-too-brief "Arlie", on which his most fragile melody-- a tender apology somewhere between Brian Wilson and Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse-- hovers temporarily in a thick haze of echoed piano and Mellotron, then slowly disappears. Yet even Laner's more meandering moments on Neighbor reflect more upon his past experience with sound-sculptures-- or, in the case of "Falling Time", recreate them directly-- than a drift toward navel-gazing.
Most importantly, though, Neighbor is Brad Laner's return to making a guitar record, one that shows he is still finding ways to extract as many mangled and gorgeous sounds from his instrument as ever. Sharing space with his soft, gossamer vocals and keyboard flourishes, the axe frequently makes its presence known. Part of "Out Cold"'s paisley collage is a digitally-treated, high-frequency "Tangerine"-type solo; "Alambres" and "Vecino" (Spanish for "neighbor") alternate Latin American picking with dirty psych smears; "June Gloom" vacillates between robotic acoustic strums and all-out dissonance.
Neighbor's scope is wrapped up and encapsulated on its final song, "Circumscribe", which completely engulfs a bottleneck slide moment with a coda of whooshing, clattering noise. It's an appropriate finishing flourish for a record that executes so well its author's quick bursts of inspiration, packaging them within an aesthetic that threatens, but never fully implodes. Laner himself explains best in a slightly different context, in his last lyrics on the record: "We're not talking 'til all you've dissembled is made right."
