Has any other label done more to fight the unwarranted stigma attached to the side project than Sub Pop? Recently, Ugly Casanova and The Postal Service have served their artists as leftfield career highlights while fans anxious awaited new material from their full-time bands. 2004 isn't yet two months old, and the label has already unleashed yet another unexpected slice of side project ingenuity with Rilo Kiley guitarist (and sometime vocalist and songwriter) Blake Sennett's collaboration-heavy debut as The Elected. Sennett, thankfully, is worthy of the endeavor. His originals with Rilo Kiley have always alluded to an infatuation with the breathy tenor and fragile melodies of Elliott Smith, but also manage to bring in a healthy, Byrdsian Rickenbacker sparkle that's allowed for some of Rilo Kiley's most earnest (if oft-overlooked) material.
Despite the shamefully lame album art, Me First proves to be a remarkably consistent and memorable listen. Each of Sennett's songs overflows with fragments of hyper-specific details like dates and place names, which lends an uneasy and illusory intimate quality to the album. On the record's opener, "7 September 2003", the title signifies the date on which the conversation documented in the song takes place; later, the listener learns that it's also fifteen days before the narrator's birthday. This kind of unabashedly meta pandering, trademarked by the likes of Conor Oberst, usually only leads to solipsistic levels of melodrama, but the specificity of each number here seems to fuel Sennett's piercingly dry humor instead. On album highlight "Greetings in Braille" (on which Jenny Lewis makes a rather ambiguous guest appearance), Sennett coos such biting confessional bits of dialogue as, "If you see me down at the liquor store, please don't tell my dad/ And if you see my dad down at the liquor store, please don't tell me anything at all."
Sennett is aided here by a rotating cast of indie rock royalty-- from producer Mike Mogis, who lends his characteristic production work, to Jimmy Tamborello's sonic flourishes, to guest vocalist Orenda Fink of Azure Ray, to fellow Sennett's Rilo Kiley cohorts Jenny Lewis and Jason Boesel. Fortunately, the restraint of each lends Me First an unexpectedly refined quality: Rather than announcing their presence with a grandiose flair, the artists are content to garnish these tracks with subtle nuances. "A Time for Emily" is an all-too-brief burst of horn-accented piano pop set to a minimal bossa nova beat and skittering drum programming, while the rousing denouement "Don't Blow It" sees Rhodes keyboard and mercurial synth melodies giving way to a Saddle Creek style singalong courtesy of The Mogis Choral Ensemble. It's revealing that a line addressed to Elliott Smith tops Sennett's thank-yous in this album's liner notes, but if Me First fails to quite live up to the promise of its influences, it still stands as a warm-hearted soundtrack to reminiscing on the kind of music with which you grew up.
