Seldom Slumber

Continuing the string of winners that started with 2005's To Sur with Love, Graves leader Greg Olin maintains his role as the single mellowest dude in all of Portland, OR. It's not that put-on, hippy-dippy, Jack Johnson barefoot in the coffee house kind of mellow, either: despite the album title, Olin approaches his arrangements and performances like he's on the verge of drifting off into a nice mid-afternoon doze. Witness the second track, "Kampu Blues," which consists entirely of a couple of jazzy counterpoint guitar lines, some shaggy drumming, and Olin's ex-girlfriend occasionally muttering spoken lines in her native Cambodian. That's immediately followed by "RV Love," which with its offhand trumpet lines courtesy of keyboardist Cory Gray and a pair of female vocalists chirping wordless harmony vocals, sounds like the most chilled-out Stereolab song of all time. Even the most assertive song here, the instrumental "Dead Dog," struggles to get up to an easygoing lope of a tempo despite the best efforts of a rhythm guitar track that's playing a "Sister Ray"-derived chug to spur everyone else on; after an unexpectedly splashy and florid organ solo lifted out of a roller rink circa 1961, a jazzy lead guitar solo commences and then just as suddenly ends as the song just kind of dissolves into nothingness around it. The slacker's lament "Television," with its says-it-all chorus "All I know is I love cartoons," adds Latin percussion and flamenco guitar to make it the album's most immediately accessible tune, and then at the album's end, Olin goes all Neu! 2 on it with "Televicion," the exact same recording played about 15 rpm too slow. It would all be painfully too cool for school were it not for the fact that Olin's songwriting is anything but amateurish and sloppy: the songs on Seldom Slumber are emphatically low-key, but they're well-crafted and carefully arranged, which allows the willfully hazy atmosphere to enhance the songs rather than overtake them.