So, I suppose the blurry creature being held up to the window in the photograph on this record's cover is a cat, and that the album title some sort of inane pun, but you could easily extend the title to apply to the actual music here: Pussyfootin' consists of gently rendered acoustic pop songs that decline to get up in your face, but not so light that you wouldn't notice having them around. But most clearly, the title refers to the fact that these are some of the earliest recordings made by The Capitol Years, back when it was just one guy named Shai Halperin who hadn't yet decided what he wanted to sound like; the disc compiles a bunch of songs he laid to tape way back when and ignored until finally releasing them in late 2003.
The stuff he pulls from his body of 2000 and 2001 recordings offers portents of both of the directions in which his music career has taken him since then. The down-home vibe foreshadows the intimacy, if not the breadth, of his official debut, Meet Yr Acres, while the directness and umambiguously organic approach is more akin to 2002's Jewelry Store EP, the first Capitol Years album to feature a full band. There's a grab-bag of touchstones here, from obvious ones (Dylan, Parsons-era Byrds), to a few less expected ones ("There's a Bridge" sounds like Leo Kottke backing Tom Petty).
The Kottke influence becomes particularly apparent on the instrumentals "Sloppy Train" and "South Jersey", finger-pickin'-good guitar acoustic guitar workouts that help to pace the collection and make it feel more like a cohesive album. Shai obviously had more on his mind than acoustic folk when he recorded these songs, though, and subtle things, like the abundance of slapback echo on "Those Who Suck Will Blow" or what sounds like a flute mellotron on "Hookers" crop up unexpectedly to add other colors. The sound collage and vocal processing of "There's a Starlet" could even be called ambitious if it lasted for more than a minute.
It doesn't all work, naturally, as "Wear You Down" sounds too worn down; the harmonies and slow, distant drums come across like The Kingsbury Manx recording after 65 continuous hours without sleep. "Tumbleweed Prayer", a cross-country collaboration with a songwriter named Michael Taylor, has a certain lo-fi charm to it, but it's also quite the patch job-- Taylor's vocal tape sounds like it was recorded in the foyer of a Dairy Queen on Fisher Price equipment, and it's out of time to the point where Shai's accompaniment has to drop out for a few seconds here and there and come back in when the beat is reestablished. A shame, too, because otherwise, it sounds like a pretty good song.
Andy Rooney was just groaning a few minutes ago on 60 Minutes about taking stock of what's clogging up your closets each year, and deciding what to get rid of, and that seems to be what Shai is doing before moving on to the next phase of the Capitol Years. While Pussyfootin' works well as a stopgap, though, I'm more eager to see what he'll do on a full-length with his new band, which holds a lot of promise if their live show and first EP are any indication. At any rate, this exercise in cleaning house makes for an enjoyable record, and a satisfactory wrapup for this band's earliest phase.
