2 out of 5

Label: Perishable Records

Producer: Charles Kim, Jason Adasiewicz (recorded by)

I wonder if I’ll end up re-buying this album.  This, along with Frontier, are the two Perishable releases that always seemed to be at odds with the label.  Joan of Arc seemed off at first, but the more I listened to it, the more how I got the kitchen sink groove.  And SLE seems to fit more than the groove of Frontier, as it’s folky, and smoky, and maybe sad, but Perishable, to me, has this sort of herky-jerky robotic feel drumming beneath most of its albums, some kind of mechanical creepers that turn even pretty bands – like the Fruit Bats (whose subsequent Sub Pop albums don’t belong on the label, but the first one totally does) – into somewhat threatening and haunting specters, floating above you, dreamily plucking worn instruments.  I attribute most of this to the shared players / producers, Brian Deck taking care of things early on, passing the reigns to Graeme Gibson.  Some recognizable Clava or Red Red Meat guy seems to show up on every Perishable release.  …Except SLE.  SLE has Andrew Bird, and Ken Vandermark, and is essentially Charles Kim of Pinetop Seven, another smoky folky band that was, yeah, just a bit too pretty and peaceful for my tastes.

But I can normally separate my tastes from what I think a band is aiming for, and frankly, Anniversary… feels boring to me.  Perhaps especially so because some tracks are so rich and rewarding – “Small of the Back,” for example, brings all of these players together in a winding, backwoods drawl of strummed guitar and rolling percussion – but then the album will switch back to a main instrumental theme that’s a bit too shoulder-shruggy for me (neither happy nor sad, just a pretty lil’ tune) to sit with, at length, for the majority of the tracks.  This is a very jazz thing to do, to play with one central theme over the course of an album, and this is the most jazz-influenced of the Perishable stable (…I mentioned Vandermark, yes?), but again, despite my lack of experience in a genre, several re-listens and reading about the group will normally give me enough insight to grasp it, and here I just don’t feel like there’s much to grasp.  Scud Mountain Boys, Pinetop Seven – they belong to a specific form of jazzy folk that doesn’t hold much weight for me, being not affecting enough to merit its weepy pacing.  SLE might be Charles Kim trying to identify himself as a songwriter separate from his group, and compositionally this is sound, but it maintains that same mood.

It thus goes without saying that if you like that style, you’ll probably like this album.  I think I’ve hesitated to push it away because it sounds great – the production highlights every element so perfectly, and the rumbling drums that link some songs together is misleadingly chilling – but sometimes… sometimes an album just ain’t for us.

*I gave the disc one more spin, and I can even start to see how this fits into the Chicago puzzle on Sam Prekop like cool-cat vibes and grooves, but for every Tortoise, who Doug McCombs his way across in a stutter of mixed styles, there’s a Sea & Cake who just shimmies, daddio, and it’s a bit too goatee for me.  Endless justifications on this album.  But even the lead track (after a horn blasting intro) – “The Black Pool,” has little hints of where it doesn’t click, staying just above a certain mood, the song ending right before it seems like its build the requisite steam… and not ending in a notably abrupt way, but just ending in a soft FM way, here comes the announcer to soothe us to our next track…