3 out of 5

Label: Eastern Fiction

Produced by: Jim Putnam

The years have been kind to Radar Bros.  Jim Putnam and crew have nursed their sound into something appealingly wholesome and yet fractured, growing more lush while maintaining the fragility of the earlier material.  Putnam has always been front and center, but while I felt that his identity was somewhat subsumed by the group’s sound early on, I more strongly associated the band with the artist from album to album.  This laid the groundwork for the prospect of a solo album being mighty interesting.

And Mt. Wilson Repeater is interesting.  That a singer/songwriter type would sink back into an odd melange of electronic doodling isn’t, for better or worse, the most original of solo / side project concepts, but Putnam doesn’t o.d. it, instead picking and choosing some choice Radar Bros. elements – his voice, that delayed guitar strum – a piecing it together with a layered and tasteful selection of manipulations.  It’s appreciably restrained, and results in some hoped-for dramatic affects that definitely bear the hallmark of Putnam’s band while also standing quite apart: Mt. Wilson Repeater tracks would feel out of place on any given RB disc.

The one-man-band bit does show, though: despite the tracks having quite a few concepts and sounds wound together, things feel comparatively slight next to Radar Bros.  Slight doesn’t mean unsatisfying, per se, but it’s too easy to let the music slip into the background; attentive listening is very rewarding, you just have to be, like, vigilantly attentive: Putnam is still a slo-core practitioneer, and so Mt. Wilson Repeater’s songs carry on past a certain point, and add a bridge, and a coda, and towards the end of the disc, if you’ve let your attentions fade, you might start to hear things, eh, repeat.

Still, there’s no crossover-hesitation here: if you like Radar Bros., lament the lack of new material, and missed the notice that Putnam had put this out – it’s a worthy addition to your library.