Record Review

Lackthereof

My Haunted
(FILMguerrero; 2008)

Rating: 78%
Combined Rating: 78%

My Haunted is a marvelous, ingratiating little album, and that is a diagnosis I’ve made before. So let me apologize: the facets of My Haunted that limn the “littleness” to which it prescribes—the spare instrumentation, the milquetoast phrases that seem ready-built for a thematic vacuum, how tall Danny Seim is (like 7 ft.) compared to how short the album is (under 34 minutes)—are only exaggerated by the “marvelous” part; with little to no real marketing strategy behind FILMguerrero’s push for the album, existing only in 180 gram vinyl and digital format, and with Menomena’s indie-pop Cerberus growing more adorable heads with every tour, Seim’s eighth solo under the Lackthereof name is, by all means, unassumingly great—great, that is, for how unassuming it may be.

Because despite Seim’s myth-making size (at least 8 ft. tall), My Haunted is still a record preternaturally in opposition to Menomena’s burgeoning canon. A shame, sure, because shit will always get billed as “Menomena’s Danny Seim” or “See the World’s Tallest Rock and Roll Drummer! Gasp in Awe & Support Thine Neck!” before a name eleven years in gestation alluding to a kind of laconic nothingness ever will. Not fair, right, but check the symmetry: where Menomena is rhythmically-based, Lackthereof is carved mostly out of minor-key melodies; where Menomena is a fastidious studio beast, democratically-minded, Lackthereof is openly afraid of the professional studio setting, conceding to primitive techniques on the floor in his basement; where Menomena is a shifting, ambidextrous circus of programmed loops and surprising instrumentation, Lackthereof is tempered and sober, owing all sound to a bass drum, keyboard, maybe some brush sticks, and a plastic-y acoustic guitar traded for copies when Seim used to work at Kinkos back when he was only like 9 feet tall. Further critical demerits are assigned for failing to divorce the two, as I will demonstrate in the following, but let’s be honest: you were probably a Menomena fan before you ever found out about Lackthereof (unless you’ve lived in Portland the last decade) and if you found out about Lackthereof then you are probably a Menomena fan.

So why challenge the inevitable? Familiarity allows Seim’s dirty tenor to expand but soften, to dose otherwise dour songs with a sense of humor more palatable for phrases like “I’d embarrass / Both of us” or “I’m saving up for when I’m older / With devils riding on my shoulder” (layering a second vocal line, placing “angels” right on top of its opposite). Familiarity, too, lends a stark precision to Seim’s songs, peddling white space like necessity between more rudimentarily placed clicks and clacks. A Menomena song normally balks at white space—why “The Pelican” leapt so singularly from Friend and Foe (2007)—and there’s the kicker, the joint at which the cycle breaks: My Haunted is one of the most consistently tactile albums I’ve heard in a long while, since at least Gultskra Artikler’s latest, and then god knows what before. It’s more than the physical room Seim clears by sticking to his humble means; each instrument is a graspable unit with definitive borders and this is something sincerely muddled in every one (or what I’ve heard—I’m sure even Danny’s wife hasn’t been exposed to it all) of Lackthereof’s past releases, usually padded in meticulous beats and the general, ever-lovin’ din of lo-fi.

Opening track “It’s Over” chimes listlessly but breathes, even whistles, Seim’s guitar almost plucked more than strummed, nylon strings snapping taut as every movement stirs out of the ether. Tracks like “Every Kind Word” or “Holywater” build self-consciously, female backup soldered to each frame more than piled on, but the intent’s still salient, less indulgent than just a logical broadening of each song’s initial guitar figure. Even “Century,” eminent because of some harmonium burp fuzzing behind Seim’s vocals, never drowns in the extra glut; we’re still aware of fingers tripping key to key, a bicep working the instrument’s bellows. We can clearly hear these things, sense the effort maybe, but as the short album replays over and over naturally, the tracks (internally and out) tessellate without struggle, individual white space grayed by the whole.

Of course, we’re still irked, taught to seek some purity in taking the album on its own terms because that speaks most clearly to our heralded senses of objectivity. But there’s something to be said about investment. The kind that makes Phish fans obstinate and shitty Leonard Cohen documentaries worth watching. If under the blazing lights of something bigger something smaller is set in sharp contrast, chiaroscuro illustrating all the something smaller’s pleats as mountains and valleys instead of subtler stuffs, then cool; those lights are going to blaze anyway, making ghosts of your idols, regardless of whether or not you acknowledge them. And Danny Seim will still be ten feet high no matter how resiliently he stays away from the drumkit or how haunted he is by his bigger band. In all the shades of relativity difficult to parse I’m embracing my investment in these denizens of Portland, looking forward to next time I see Danny at some show, thinking, “Wouldn’t it be funny to see him give me a hug because I’m so short and he’s so tall, wouldn’t that be a spectacle?” No, not really. So what—size matters, don’t let those haters tell you otherwise.