(Carpark)
Chaz Bundick can really sing; his voice is a soothing combination of surfer casual and weighty soul that sounds as good when softly intoning as when wordlessly wailing. Bundick can also craft some solid keyboard and toy piano trills that can occasionally provide a bit of gentle beauty or impressive atmosphere. (I advise new agers in need to take "Before I'm Done" and "Elise" to yoga class.)
What he's missing, then, are songs. That's not to say there's nothing here you can learn to hum to yourself with a little practice, and maybe there are a couple of hooks that will make their way into the summer's musical vocabulary. But mark my words, there aren't many, and Bundick's melodies tend to wander off in clipped, incomplete directions like the worst psychedelia. Indeed, he could score with an Ariel Pink sort of flukish style-play if his fixation were with the kind of music he's writing.
Instead, he shares the odd obsession of many concurrent songwriters with AM Gold soft rock of the Carter and Reagan administrations. Whereas Ariel Pink approaches his genre lifts with an attractive outrageousness and Twin Shadow and elder statesman Dan Bejar of Destroyer utilize this music, once the antithesis of college rock, as a springboard for their idiosyncratic songwriting, Bundick can't seem to get past just wanting his stuff to feel like something you'd have heard on the radio after midnight in a certain period. His approach is clinical, weirdly seductionless, and stripping Hall & Oates of their ham-handed sensuality (brash and sexist though they may ultimately have been) really leaves nothing at all worth mentioning. I'm told there's something here, and the supergross cover certainly suggests a far more interesting artist than the one I seem to be hearing, but this delicate, pleasant stuff puts me right to sleep.
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