American record racks will always be peppered with competent and gratingly mature albums by artists with easy grins and nice cheekbones: see the benign-but-pleasant cooing of James Taylor, David Gray, and Joseph Arthur, or check the sudden and fantastic popularity of neo-powerhouse/Blue Note savior Norah Jones. What's most perplexing about these artists is not necessarily the relative blankness of their drowsy, silk-soft pop/rock/jazz-- it's the constant, undying ubiquity of it. Keith Harris, writing in the Seattle Weekly last week, pointed out how, in 2002, Norah Jones provided an improbable (but obviously valuable) antidote to the bizarre flamboyance of American entertainment-- that her appeal is inextricably linked to the casual tedium of her work. So is there a valid role in contemporary America for dozy-but-decent background music? The Autumn Defense openly suggests that, yes, congenial sincerity and sharp, glowing guitars are perfectly sufficient, more than enough to keep everybody warm and distracted. And in a way, they're completely right.
John Stirratt has played bass for Wilco since the band's inception in 1994, and anybody who caught even a few key scenes of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart gets that, by now, Stirratt might require an independent (read: non-Jeff Tweedy supervised) side project to release his personal artistic steam. The Autumn Defense has provided Stirratt that opportunity for the last three years, allowing him to pair with multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and to crank out some docile, glowing country-folk.
Circles, the band's second full-length, boasts a few familiar guests-- Tweedy makes an appearance, adding subtle guitar figures to "Why I'm Like This", and Andrew Bird scrapes his violin on "The Answer"-- and Stirratt and Sansone have been joined by new bandmates Brad Jones (bass, organ) and Greg Wiz (drums, percussion). Still, The Autumn Defense's plumped-up roster hasn't necessarily bred a thicker sound: Most of Circles is spare, golden and peaceable. Unsurprisingly, the record was recorded during a long, mulish Nashville winter, and Circles aptly reflects an immediate and careful self-insulation, with each warm, wispy strand of sentimental folk coiling and fading like steam from a teacup.
Softer and less psych-heavy than its predecessor, 2001's The Green Hour, Circles is a slow, loving tribute to early 70s songwriters, swinging from Gene Clark-ish country to Big Star pop, keeping the scene as pretty and as polished as possible. The only problem is that it's difficult to tell exactly when Circles stops sounding like clean, earnest alt-country and starts to sound an awful lot like Air Supply. On occasion, the record even goes so far as to echo, in spirit, the syrupy promises and honeyed whispers of The Carpenters (see the "I would die/ If I thought anyone would hurt you/ Yes, and I would cry/ To think anyone could do something like that" of the near-unbearable "Written in the Snow").
Stirratt's vocals are high and sweet, sprinkled with just enough salt to blend easily into his band's cymbal-tapping and gentle strumming, and very few of these songs attempt to wiggle out of their self-imposed restraints, settling, instead, into deep, satisfying lulls. Subsequently, listening to Circles is not entirely dissimilar to falling asleep in front of a fireplace, feet half-dangling out from under an orange afghan, a partially eaten oatmeal cookie resting on a napkin: The entire scene seethes with warm, quiet comfort, and your eyelids have no choice but to get progressively heavier, inching together until you can't quite see straight. Sleep seems imminent. And then you realize that it's actually only 6:00 PM.
