There's a style of music out there sent to condition the listener into thinking that its yawning, eye-gooey sounds were faithfully cobbled together into a patchwork blanket of bedtime in some opium den, rural deep-walnut bedroom, or other plushly closed-up space with those little glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Often, the bands who sing these self-conscious lullabies are best understood while you, the listener, are also saddled-down all cozy and half-awake, maybe with pillows over your head or your windows painted a solid, endless black (this way you can invent an ideal landscape of longing for your perfectly uninspired town). This is psych-pop, and as with all psychotropics, once you have experimented you can never go back.
Eschewing a third-person adjectival name for his sleep-deprived pop-psych, Greg Weeks, who looks to me like a gaunter, fresh-faced Vincent Gallo and actually sounds a bit like that spanner of time, plays a predictable but also enjoyable brand of gentle insomniac rock. Weeks' five-song EP, Slightly West (perhaps titled in reference to a half-assed manifest destiny) often plays like it came to Weeks during a 20-minute break in an otherwise deeply restive stretch of time. In a lot of ways (some good and some bad) it barely registers on his homemade sleep-monitoring machine.
The opening "One Summer Night" has welcoming organs like that old church song called "Hallelujah"; for some reason it made me think of Kenny Rogers' "We've Got Tonight". Maybe it's the boy/girl vocals? Or the sense, impending, that this is the last day these two have together? Shit, even more confusing to the participants, it might be the first of many: "One summer night/ By firelight/ We laid out under the stars/ And set our sights." To be picky, I'd like it better if they set their sighs.
The next four songs are standard in a lot of ways, but the addition of crunchy and distorted analog-sounding keyboard, organ, and/or synth parts make what could've been paint-by-numbers-boring sort of firefly languid. "Unsettled (By the Sun)" is more psych, less pop, and talks of nightmares and dreams ("Who wants inside a dream?"). The vocals are submerged in the shade of drums, organ, bass, and little jangling bells. The title track (incidentally, also the album's strongest) is comforting like the smell of a skunk on a dark road in some town you're just barely visiting. It speaks of false comforts-- "It's safe by the sea/ The ocean/ But crawling up behind"-- but comfort nonetheless.
By song four, "Devils", I was hemming and hawing about Weeks' voice being a bit nondescript. Here, too, the organ parts are patchy and overly "sinister." The song is obviously stitched and fails to flow quite as nicely as the first three: a fucked-up Frankenstein monster all awkward and unworkable. On "Settle Down" there are moments where I peel my ears to hear Magic Hour guitar parts, but it's never as dense or sustained (though I do think I heard a gong!).
Sustain. The weakness of this offering at the alter of pixie dust is that the shit never busts out. There are those pretty moments on the first three tracks, but it largely feels truncated, like when a band has two seconds of feedback at the end of a song and then fades to the next (are we supposed to imagine endlessness?).
But at the same time that I talk of making things last longer, more densely, it's actually the brevity of the recording that works in Weeks' favor, since the songwriting and singing aren't particularly striking. The mood evoked is pleasant enough-- and there's nothing overtly ridiculous or aesthetically embarrassing-- but at the same time, getting by on one connotation can only last so long. I think of the laughable melancholy of Codeine, whereas the more inspired shut-eye of, say, early Spacemen 3 could seemingly go on until forever, keeping you wrapped in dreamscapes until kingdom come, amen...
But knowing one's strengths and/or limitations is nothing to push aside. On his website, Weeks mentions the importance of the EP to his oeuvre, how sometimes what needs to be said requires a short story, not a novel. I guess I just like it when there's fucked-up poetry, too. I mean, even when you're recording in a metaphorical bedroom, it helps to climb out the window or sneak through a hole in the wall and dream your nightmare on the roof, expand outward to the blank spaces around you.
