Sooner or later, every neighborhood gets a song, and it's usually the song it deserves: MacArthur Park is as every bit hideous as "MacArthur Park". If we're to trust "The Park Slope Song" and others on James William Hindle's album Prospect Park, this musician-friendly Brooklyn neighborhood (where I happen to reside) is an almost disturbingly fine place to live. Apparently, it's like the new Haight Asbury or something. In fact, judging from the number of references to sunshine, birds, and other cheerily pleasant phenomena, it's closer to Michael Chabon's mythic Summerland than to any earthly location. This thesis is supported by the album's gossamer arrangements, featuring every instrument capable of issuing a gentle chime: mandolin, glockenspiel and the rest. Hindle sells you on a dippy Park Slope mythos previously peddled in the movie Smoke, and better than any realtor could, because he appears thoroughly sold on it himself.
Woozily romantic, slighly soggy and by all indications dedicated to the members of the author's immediate family, "Prospect Park" is the definition of innocuousness. Hindle thanks Beachwood Sparks and a couple of erstwhile Elephant Six-ers in his liner notes, but he doesn't really belong with that crowd. I would rather place him-- cruelly, perhaps-- in the granola-folk school of Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell: consider him the lost fourth cryer in Cry Cry Cry.
"You Will Be Safe" opens the album on a decidedly therapeutic note, albeit contradicted by churlish guitars. After the not-quite-jazzy "Come Down Slowly", Hindle makes the mortal mistake of starting a song called "Leaving Trains" with the riff and strum from Sheryl Crow's "Strong Enough". That the album recovers at all is testament to Hindle's songwriting and charisma.
The two highlights here are "The Country Song"-- not an actual C&W; number but rather a Simon & Garfunkel tune garnished with banjo-- and "The Great Woodland Summer". Picking things up halfway through the album, the song is fast by Hindle's languid standards, as well as surprisingly R.E.M.-ish-- although it has to overcome a monumentally dorky title and a couple of mewling licks toward the end, the kind Peter Buck wouldn't be caught dead with.
It's a short affair-- 35 minutes-- but enough to finish while drinking your double capuccino. If I sound unenthused about the record, it's for the most part indie snobbery. We like our folk rock haunting (Nina Nastasia, Neko Case) or haunted by Brian Wilson. Hindle, on the other hand, seems genuinely happy to be here. And if you think he's irrepairably fixated on Park Slope, take solace in a song called "Hoboken": perhaps his next CD-length ode to the patterns of yuppie migration is already in the works.
