Barsuk
2004
Cellar Door
About This Album
John Vanderslice muses about family and pseudo fantasy on Cellar Door, his fourth solo album. He's comfortable inside the sputtering sonics of the understated indie rock universe he and collaborator Scott Solter have assembled; it is assemblage, after all, since Vanderslice's pristine production -- when applied to his own songwriting -- acts as enormous and super-sharp ghost scissors, snipping, trimming, and carefully carving curves and swirls into a pop paper crane both delicate and dark. He patiently puts buzzing keyboards up against tense, ringing electric guitars and percussive overtures ("Coming and Going on Easy Terms") and begins the album with blurts of backmasked and treated acoustic guitar over whining drums ("Pale Horse," which suggests the heady, off-kilter pop of pals Spoon), through it all mulling the meaning of familial relationships and dwelling in places or on characters that drift in the margins of reality. Vanderslice is a prison guard, a door gunner, or the junkie offspring of a gone-bananas mother. In the pretty, desperate "They Won't Let Me Run," he's an angry man cuffed to his last name's legacy; inside the electronic throb of "Up Above the Sea," he's a reluctant hunter, unwilling to kill but wondering what will happen if he does.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,4,6 and 11)

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