Slow Note From a Sinking Ship
Mac McCaughan, founder of the North Carolina label Merge, takes a break from the melodic punk guitars of his better-known band, Superchunk, to brew a low-key batch of songs under an alias that salutes the static of the Portastudio four-track tape recorder. His second album of home and studio concoctions featuring mostly Mac (with friends like Helium's Ash Bowie and Superchunk's Jon Wurster),Slow Note from a Sinking Shipis a taste of the stuff McCaughan dreams up that falls outside the narrow stylistic realm of his main band. Much ofSlow Note--notably "When You Crashed," "Running Water," and "A Cunning Latch"--is an unusual but not entirely unfamiliar clash of lazy lap steel, woozy acoustic strumming, new wave synth sounds, and postpunk guitar-effect washes. Mac impressively balances the looseness and immediacy of lo-fi with a fairly clean studio sound to make what he calls a "totally mid-fi" record.--Roni Sarig