Time moves slowly for Burlington, Vt., singer-songwriter Ryan Power. Anyone picking up a copy of I Don't Want to Die, his debut vinyl offering for NNA Tapes, is tumbling into his mindset from over two years ago, when this set of songs was originally released. So it's taken the world some time to catch up with Power, but he's probably okay with that. "I'm a slow burner when it comes to writing songs", he said, in an interview earlier this year. This new album finds him refining his gentle pop vision, while splashing it with touches of New Age pensiveness and moments that topple over into dissonance. In that interview, Power talks of a fondness for Scritti Politti and Prefab Sprout, and it's not hard to see their influence seeping into I Don't Want to Die. Often his music is glossed over with the same kind of plastic sheen as the two most barefaced pop statements from those acts (Cupid & Psyche 85 and From Langley Park to Memphis, respectively).
But the roots of I Don't Want to Die clearly sprout from lo-fi origins, and this is a far more inward-looking work than anything Green Gartside or Paddy McAloon were striving for when they decided to max out their pop potential. Naturally, Power is working on a much smaller budget than those artists, but it's to his credit that the joints rarely show. Occasionally a drum machine might sound too tinny ("The Knowhow") or the production may feel unnecessarily strangulated ("The Way It's Always Been"), but mostly he's able to paper over those cracks. Power's biggest strengths are in his voice, which can shift from sullen to sparkling in a heartbeat without sounding remotely like a stretch for him; and the dexterous way he can manipulate song structure to suit his whims, often managing to squash jazz-funk, pop, and rock impulses into a tiny space where they all bounce off one another.
When it works, it's a delight. "Mondo Rush", the standout track here, is a finely carved slice of utopian pop, shot through with the promise of a better world somewhere around the bend. It's similar to the kind of bittersweet feeling that edges into the 1980s Brat Pack staple "Tenderness" by General Public, and the high-cheese-factor keyboard sounds Power deploys also strongly mirror that era. But he's too restless to settle on a single, definable style. After "Mondo Rush" he's channeling wistful Bill Withers moves on the title track, then heading into the muted Ariel Pink-isms of "Transition Possible" and "You Wanna Seltzer". Like Pink on Before Today, Power is keen to explore the tension that occurs when you throw a brilliant sheen over angular rock. But when he's sticking a fork in the leg of pop ("Rag Rug") his vision starts to feel flabby, heading close to a kind of unnecessary antagonism that he successfully rinsed out of sublime tracks like album opener "Don't Care".
That disconnect in the direction in which Power takes I Don't Want to Die is where it splinters. It feels like too many whims are being indulged, too many chances are being taken just to see where they lead him. It's unlikely Power would be satisfied being a straight-down-the-line singer-songwriter, but nothing else here comes remotely close to the angelic calm corkscrewing through "Mondo Rush" and "Don't Care". The Ariel Pink comparison will most likely irk him after a while, but he's undeniably trailing in his wake here, and with umpteen Pink albums readily available, it's difficult to see what the oblique work on I Don't Want to Die offers that isn't already out there. That's a problem many musicians face when they draw inspiration from artists whose aesthetics are so fully formed: How do you immerse yourself in that other world and then escape from it into a space that's discernibly your own?
