For his previous album, San Francisco musician Kelley Stoltz wrote all the songs and recorded all the instruments. Finding himself with no label, he simply pressed a few hundred copies onto vinyl and sold them at local record stores. For his new album, Below the Branches, he had some help, not just the guest musicians who play on these songs, but also an interested record label, namely Sub Pop. So it seems particularly odd that for all the time and sweat Stoltz has put into this music, there's no sense of a real person behind these songs, just a tightly wound bundle of ideas borrowed from likely pop sources.
"Ever Thought of Coming Back" begins with Beach Boys harmonies that are almost litigiously similar to "Don't Worry Baby", "Memory Collector" relies on idyllic recollections much like those on The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, and "Wave Goodbye" and "Birdies Singing" capture some of the goofier aspects of the Beatles. On the other hand, far too many songs evoke solo Lennon, solo McCartney, and solo Harrison (unsurprisingly, I don't detect very much solo Starr). These aren't exactly adventurous touchstones, and Below the Branches comes off as too reverent and polite, as if Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are holy texts. But the popular canon he plugs into never feels very personal to Stoltz; something unexpected might have broken this impersonal spell-- perhaps some of the New Wave he channeled on his song-for-song cover album of Echo & the Bunnymen's Crocodiles, for example.
"Find a thing that makes you happy," Stoltz sings on "Wave Goodbye". "Find a thing that gets you high." Below the Branches shows he's found his thing. The care with which he's fashioned and recorded these songs is as obvious as the influences, and while affectionate perfectionism doesn't guarantee listenability (in fact, it often precludes it), in this case craft is the album's saving grace. Stoltz's attention to sonic detail ensures the choruses are catchy when they're supposed to be catchy, the tempos jaunty when they're supposed to be jaunty, the mood dark or sunny whenever it's supposed to be either dark or sunny. The keyboard fanfare that kicks off "Summer's Easy Feeling" quickly and neatly transforms into a contemplative motif as the tempo picks up. "Memory Collector" has what sounds like an impromptu mouth trumpet solo, and "Words" descends on a meditative keyboard crawl that creates a curiouser and curiouser mood. Alas, nothing much comes of it before song's end.
But don't read that hollowness the wrong way. Stoltz is a pop universalist, and on Below the Branches, he seems willing to absent himself so that the listener can become the focus, so the music can speak for whomever hears it instead of whomever makes it. I'm not sure this approach works as well as it could-- emptiness is emptiness, regardless of its intentions-- but Below the Branches seems nevertheless genuinely and generously deferential, a tip of the hat to whomever's on the other end of the artist/audience equation. The caveat is that listeners may never hear nearly as much in these songs as Stoltz does.
