Plot Against Rachel, Plot Against Rachel

Having had an extremely prominent ex by the name of Rachael (just in case you’re keeping score), I have to admit to some initial disappointment: despite the catchy name, the CD you (presumably) hold in your hot little hands does not detail, in any significant way, how to revenge oneself on my “Rachel,” much less any others. There are no schematics and no homemade explosives. Beyond that initial disappointment, however, one finds little else to complain about in this initial offering from the Bay Area hipsters. If this is a plot, it’s a sweet one, the goal being to, I don’t know, tenderize? Maybe it’s to distract with sweetness and abrasion.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. This is a slightly math-y, extremely tuneful offering. More than that, it’s an extremely precise recording: each note fits together as delicately as the interlocking bones of an outstretched hand. “Terminal A” starts us off in the off-kilter, slightly sad are (think about waiting at a bus stop, think about being lonely at a bus stop, think Robitussin and plaintive) — admittedly, the lyrics are a bit opaque, but occasional lines do emerge from the seasick mess (“did you remember to call your mother?”). Nice. We move, from there, quickly into the more jangly “Casual Carpool,” which, despite the name, seems, you know, sweet and lonely still, but now by a fence of some sort. Distant horizons sorting themselves into loss.

If there’s a weakness to this five-song offering, it’s that it speaks to a range that by nature of the release itself (five songs, yo, only five songs) can’t possibly be obtained. Additionally, it puts a hell of a lot of pressure on each individual song: new territory, every time, or there’s a sense of “okay, now what?” Which unfortunately does come in and out of the mix itself — sometimes the record seems a bit droney, a bit too much like itself, a bit, somehow, similar — where one wants fine, compacted difference.

But the moments of the record, the imagistic pushing, make up for whatever’s lacking in variety. The indelible (“You left a note upon my car / That didn’t get you very far”) stays with you like a sad-looking photograph. And the disorientation, the lost and found of the record (“Catch me slipping / Into the ground / Around, around”) refreshes as well as discomfits. The songs sound new, the third time through. You can’t get a firm grasp. And that elusiveness and desire are what keep you coming back.

The echo-drenched “Accord Memory” concludes the quick little suite. The harmonies are primarily vocal now and more than a little ghostly (hello, banshee!). For at least a moment one buys the song’s lyrics as self-indictment (again, “that didn’t get you very far”) but there is, again, a certain brittle quality, that keeps yrs truly fixated, if not fixed and dilated, so to speak. The occasional piano notes scattered in the musical thickness are raw and tooth-like and nicely eerie. In fact, the record as whole is eerie, dream-like, adrift on the heath. Even the noisier bits seem preludes to the delicate. I jotted down, in the margins, “occasionally rough hewn, gravesstones overturned or overgrown: just noticed.” There is something like that, throughout. Something Escher-angled and more than a little lost or even forlorn. I found myself, subsequent to my initial listen, listening to the silence that came after. That is, I found myself lingering with nothing to say and nowhere to go.