Rafter Roberts plays in indie pop band Bunky, pals around with Sufjan Stevens, and engineers albums by California bands like Black Heart Procession and Pinback. But "jingle writer" is his most salient CV line regarding his new album, Sex Death Cassette. It's an eclectic reel of curios and bagatelles that stick in your head the way good jingles do, though since they aren't selling anything besides Rafter's sensibility, their compositional craftiness is wedded to a lo-fi humility. Some of them are just little jags of inspiration: "I Love You Most of All" is a half-minute refrain for spooky falsetto and awkward acoustic guitar, like a lost Shudder to Think interlude. "Cuddling Raccoons" is a minute-long burst of handclaps and knob-twiddled garage riffs. And "Adventures" is a verse in search of a chorus, with a tripping groove and hearty brass flares making its concise point.
While the brief songs are satisfying fun-- they sound more economical than half-cooked-- Rafter does a good job of building more spacious scaffolding around his little lightning flashes when he cares to. The frilly vocal refrain of "Sleazy Sleepy" is parroted by horn line that would've made a nice little mini-song in itself. "Sleazy Sleepy" also features the kind of staticky, simple groove-- a simple template ready to receive Rafter's judicious embellishments-- that characterizes the album, from "ZZZPenchant", a baggy lockstep with snapping brass banners, to "Love Time Now Please", a Caribbean cameo with more of Rafter's beloved, jubilant horns.
The album's title is two-thirds red herring: It has indie rock's typically circumspect relationship to sex, and good luck finding it on cassette. "Death" is the key word here, as the lion's share of these overcast yet stubbornly sunny songs revolve around it, albeit usually in a playful, almost irreverent manner. This is largely because Rafter practices a sort of laughing-to-the-gallows eschatology; he rages against the dying of the light with a smirk. "They left us here to die," he sings on "Asking", "but we're not ready to die!" The sentiment is exactly opposite to the one prevailing in current big-ticket indie rock, exemplified by the Arcade Fire, where the magnitude of the end of self is tacitly conflated with the magnitude of global apocalypse.
Rafter doesn't wallow in, despair of, or mythologize death; he healthily accepts it as a natural and absolutely necessary facet of life, which perhaps explains how such a death-obsessed record can be so innocent of grand statements and undue angst. He celebrates life by acknowledging its brevity. "Life is good, you can't complain," he shrugs during the quicksilver indie-rock of "Chances". "We are the lucky ones." And on the junkyard indie-blues of "Slay Me", he gently chastises musicians who "throw it all away for a sad melody that you can't even hum." While everyone needs a sad melody sometimes-- Rafter gets off a few himself, although they're always hummable-- it scans as a subtle dig against the kind of self-serious, dour indie rock that Sex Death Cassette is such a relief from.
