5 out of 5

Label: Knw-Yr-Own

Produced by: D+ (recorded by)

I just happened to listen to Marmoset’s Mishawaka recently, and it’s a compressed blip of Marmosetty perfection, capturing all they do well in what amounted to a mini-epic of perfection.  And then I put on D+ – another stripped down band, trading Marmoset’s lo-fi 70s troubadour vibe for a shambly 90s indie pop one – and felt very similarly about Mistake, their 30ish minute ode to… hm, feelings?  Bret Lumsford, post-Beat Happening, in his Kermit the Frog croak, varies between dumb and sweet and thoughtful in D+’s lyrics, and sometimes the former two get the better of him, casting rolling eyes upon his downbeat contemplations.  A line like ‘I’m your seal of perfection, club me’ comes close to crossing that line, but it’s so over the top it kinda works for me, and mixed in with the disc’s otherwise slightly paranoid, slightly naive wide-eyed examinations, it has a fitting discomfort to it.  That general vibe is really what sets Mistake a notch above other D+ albums: the note of urgency (’twas a post-9/11 album) kicks off with the title track’s non-stop beat from Phil Elvrum, but even when we’re stripped back to acoustics as on followup The Business,  Bret seems downright expressive, wreaking potent twinkles of guitarwork out instead of just falling on chords.  This holds true for the entire album.   Some tracks carry a more direct oomph, some are barebones, but they all have an identifiable feeling behind them, culminating in the relative lushness of Take You For Granted.

As with Marmoset, there are great tracks all throughout D+’s discography, and sometimes the open-ended nature of some of their other releases can produce fantastic peaks.  Mistake, stripped of room to play around, features the band in its most direct, and possibly impactful, format.