Summer at Shatter Creek is an awful name for a band. Worse still when once you learn that it's just a mere alias for some moody, does-it-all indie-rock guy named Craig Gurwich. The moniker is too long and the alliteration involved makes it hard to say even two times fast. You could shorten it to Shatter Creek but that would be like moving from the heart of Bad Band Name City to the seedy outskirts. But such quibbles would be moot if Gurwich's apparition-folk somehow rose above his fifth-rate Skeet Ulrich slasher-flick handle on his second full-length. No such luck. Mired in empty waves of echo and sleepy-time acoustic-slosh arrangements, the singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer matches the crushing boredom of his nickname as he listlessly indulges in his own banal depressions throughout much of All the Answers.
"I used to be optimistic," croons the California man in a lofty, angelic way that recalls a seriously NyQuil-ed Jim James of My Morning Jacket, "But I can't lie/ All I see is the dying of the earth, junk piles of trash and disease." Well, ok! If "Optimistic" was some kind of post-modern, post-liberal, self-reflexive take on overbearing pessimism, it could be worth a single tear. But as is, its downtrodden lyrical bluntness and airy atmospherics waft and sway without much impact. The song's noisy and dissonant outro is a welcome respite from the flat haze, too bad such restless moments are disappointingly rare.
Gurwich's chief strength is his voice and, as producer, the multi-tracked harmonies he creates with it. Delicate and pretty, his vulnerable wail connects on the few backwoods ballads that offer a pulse, weak as it may be. The album's title track offers an appealing, slow-motion melody with the singer finding a comfort in the naive helplessness of his own trembling delivery. Still, such helplessness easily turns into a pathetic desperation with lines like, "You should pay more attention to me."
Back-to-back insomnia cures "You Don't Have to Be Perfect to Be Loved" and "Rebecca" mark the record's crusty-eyed lowpoint. The former lulls with the requisite finger-pick strum and whisper vox along with a Legend of Zelda-esque whistle refrain; while listening, I half expected gnome-y old-timers to walk out of my closest, do a lame dance around my bed and tumble to the floor. With lyrics like, "You were so young and pretty/ You were something else, yeah/ But you never felt quite pretty," the latter's twinkly-piano-propelled analysis of a young woman will make you long for the edgy insightfulness of Norah Jones.
Maybe the Craigster should learn to divvy out his many responsibilities (he also designed the album's artwork!) in a more appropriate manner for his next project because this one-man-band thing isn't doing much for my ears or, based on the record's dour words, his personal life. Get some friends. Find a nice girl. Plug in the guitar every once and a while. None of us have All the Answers, but we can usually muster up a couple good ones when prodded.
