If you scour the liner notes of your favorite albums like us music critics do, you’ve likely run across the name Mike Coykendall before. The Portlander has worked as an engineer and a session man for the likes of M. Ward (his solo material as well as his collaboration with Zooey Deschanel, She & Him), Bright Eyes and Richmond Fontaine.
However, if you are expecting a similarly sun-baked folk/country approach, you will be sadly disappointed. Sure, there are a few moments of dusty down home grace (the sadly beautiful album closer “Wonderland”, the acoustic guitar and barrelhouse piano driven “Bye-Bye-Baby-O”) but the rest of Coykendall’s second solo effort is given over to arch space pop experimentation that are a piece with fellow sonic explorers Ry Cooder and Alejandro Escovedo.
The album’s tone is both weighty and feather-light. As he laments “I get stoned every night/just trying to get it right/spacebaker looking a light” over a slow strummed acoustic on the loping “Spacebaker Blues”, his every word is echoed with a low, slightly goofy and almost robotic voice. It’s a nice representation of that too-baked moment when the simple act of a moving off a couch seems like a Herculean feat.
Having all these moments of strangeness and whimsy though only serves to drive the more directly emotional moments a lot deeper. The straightforward “First Shot, Best Shot” – a collage of regret filled and warmly nostalgic snapshots – comes off as an oasis of calm situated between the chugging “Bye-Bye-Baby-O” and the fuzzy Wilco-like “Sold Your Closet Paintings”.
It’s a weird, wonderful and (not surprisingly) inventively engineered disc that will hopefully find its way into the hands of a few daring music fans based solely on the company Coykendall keeps.
[...] Album Review: Mike Coykendall – The Unbearable Being of Likeness … [...]
February 17th, 2010 at 7:35 am