When she was only knee-high to a grasshopper, my girlfriend would tell her parents that each year's Christmas was "the best ever." That's not surprising: When your age is still a single digit, the present generally eclipses any strong sense of past or future. But when kids grow up, develop deeper frames of reference, and start smashing grasshoppers on the way home from school, such naive of-the-moment idealism seems more cloying and creepy than aw-shucks cute.
Jason Anderson's reference to a girl, a moment, or something else as "the best Christmas ever" on New England's final track is therefore the sweetie-pie, slacker wisdom epiphany that broke the camel's back. What's more, in true K Records fashion, once that sentimental sentiment moseys from Anderson's quivering lips, a besotted Muppet choir chimes in to let us know that "everything whispers 'I love you.'" That mesh of the misshapen grandiosity of high-school poetry and the stubborn details of an insulated journal is, unfortunately, signature Anderson.
Known best as the pop/rock mind behind Wolf Colonel, Anderson played drums for Yume Bitsu, toured with The Microphones, and sat-in with Little Wings. Here, he teams with Phil Elvrum, who produces and adds bass, guitar, drums, and lends vocals to "Thanksgiving" and the semi-upbeat "You Fall", and in each case, the duo tosses around in-crowd references to various forms of sinking, sagging, or going down. Anderson is less metaphorically dense than Elvrum. Instead, he's given to prolonged first-person flights and the blatantly diaristic. The minimalist verbiage of the melancholic, earthy New England shares a link with the confessional per-zines of the early-to-mid 90s, offering a blend of the embarrassing, the off-handedly endearing, and occasionally, the wise.
Anderson also receives contributions from other K regulars such as Mirah, The Blow's Khaela Maricich, and Yume Bitsu's Adam Forkner. Mirah's breathy contribution to the piano-based "A Book Laid on Its Binding" fleshes out the track's soporific lilt, which approximates Conor Oberst caught in the headlights of an off-Broadway musical dream sequence. (For a similar but more successful example of this dewy vibe, check out Eric Trip's decade-old Love Tara.) Even when he has company, Anderson still sounds lonesome-- like an everyman archiving fears and hopes and relishing simple moments.
Elsewhere, Anderson stumbles. The nine-minute, codeine-inspired monologue "Pen Pals" is patience-testing. It features 20-plus sentence fragments touching on familial distance, collegiate emptiness, last kisses, various forms of departure (death, drives to the airport), time, and the letdown of in-person meetings. I'll admit Anderson manages some decent one-liners, but even if you handed Leonard Cohen this entropic pace and stale phrasing and asked him to bring down the house, the results would still be a good night's sleep.
In the end, despite the forced poetry, it's the lack of memorable melodies that sinks Anderson's project. Lesson to be learned: Just 'cause you say it slow and moody, develop a plotline, mention Elliott Smith, and have a girl with amazing smelling hair doesn't mean your songs work.
