P:ano, Brigadoon

The job of the critic, I think, shouldn’t be to say whether or not the critic likes the record so much as to communicate whether or not you would like the record. So let’s say you’re not me. Let’s say you like high-concept stuff like the Decemberists dressing up as pirates but really wish that they would have done it with a Western-style theme, instead. And then maybe you also really, really love that whole Magnetic Fields thing, or at least what I think of as that — the early ’80s retro-synth-pop assault — and you don’t mind having your otherwise high-concept album broken up by some stray dives into said stylistic terrain. And so you have this album Brigadoon from P:ano, which for the first few tracks sounds like it’s meant to be an indie-pop band entirely influenced by the themes to Bonanza, Rawhide, et al., but then loses its thematic consistency. (Not only that, it even dives from the Western back into the world of pirates with “Ghost Pirates”.) It’s reasonably accomplished, ambitious, and at times clever, and I have no doubt that there are many who would dig this album quite greatly, and the fact that I really have no desire to listen to it ever again shouldn’t stop you if it sounds like it might be your cup of tea.