James Husband has haunted many Elephant 6-related liner notes, helping out with recordings by reserve-team E6ers Great Lakes and the Essex Green. But it's been his tireless work backing the perpetually touring Of Montreal that has put him most in the public eye, even if it involves laboring thanklessly outside the spotlight as the most normal-looking dude among Kevin Barnes' glam maelstrom.
Now that Husband is the name on the marquee, it's tempting to interpret his solo debut through the lens of the band for which he performs sideman duties. Look at A Parallax I in that light, and you can find fragments of Of Montreal's genetic material all over the place-- some overdubbed choir-of-Husbands harmonies here, a schizoid synthesizer symphony there. But where Barnes has evolved his style to a point virtually unrecognizable from the band's basement psych-pop origins, Husband shows himself to be more of an Elephant 6 traditionalist, steeping his music in Syd Barrett and Love and other late-1960s paragons.
Those classic Elephant 6 days were always marked by the inconsistency that tends to accompany a surplus of ideas, and Husband remains faithful to that element as well, alternating between moments that are rewarding and frustrating. The album gets off to a shaky start with the grating synth tone of "Little Thrills" and the mismanaged "A Grave in the Gravel", which wastes the album's best riff with clunky lyrics (spoiler warning: it's a pet's funeral). In other places, the unevenness accentuates the positive-- the chorus of "Waiting on Rayne" is as good as the clock-reading verses are irritating, and "No No Baby" takes forever to get going, but the synth fantasia at the end makes it worth the journey.
When everything really clicks on A Parallax I, Husband sounds less like his tour boss than another indie rock icon, Guided By Voices' Robert Pollard. Husband is a clear admirer-- a bonus covers EP that comes with the record is one-third GBV-- and the best songs here faithfully recreate the early days of the Guided By Voices catalog. It happens first on "Elephant Alibi", a song whose title even sounds like a Pollard tribute, and you can hear Husband asking for liberal use of the reverb knob at the offset. That mid-fi warble, so similar to the early Sandbox or Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia era of GBV, nicely infects "While the Boys Went Down Under" and "Take the Train" as well, giving both a hazy, homemade warmth that's a good fit (or less charitably, disguise) for Husband's straightforward vocals.
Call me old-fashioned, but it's a pleasant sacrifice of fidelity that makes Husband's songs more charming, even if some drift off into the haze ("Gray Scale", "The Darkestness"). Husband may struggle to get out from the shadows of his influences or his employer-- call it the sideman's curse-- but A Parallax I is a throwback to a handcrafted indie sound where ideas go a long way to offset a lack of identity.
