Elephant Micah not part of my 'dreams'

Elephant Micah makes slow, soft, arty folk for a 21st century audience that digs musical experimentalism.\nA Richmond, Ind., band releasing its label-debut record Elephant Micah, Your Dreams Are Feeding Back on the local label BlueSanct, Elephant Micah has decided to aim its musical pickup truck -- or is that riding lawnmower? -- down a rustic, dirt road with primarily acoustic guitars. They augment it with banjos, mandolins and synthesizers, all in an effort to portray quiet beauty.\nThe problem is that it gets static and self-deprecating. There's a song where the singer asks, "Where do songs come from?" To which I say, I don't know; ask Britney Spears.\nTheir roots are "Kentuckiana"-based, as the liner notes state. The radius of these roots doesn't extend far. They like country, but they don't get twangy. They like folk, but they start no campfires. They like rock but only in a plaintive singer-songwritery sort of way. In their musical dictionary, rock is a noun, not a verb. If you have driven down a lonesome highway near Tell City or somewhere like that, you can feel this sound. But since it is so of a place, it fails to transcend.\nOther bands have covered Elephant Micah's terrain better. The Baptist Generals and Califone come to mind. These bands do not have the backroads in their blood, but they do in their music. Maybe it's because when we come to school in a college town where the college is the town, we are always looking to get out as opposed to ingesting more of our environment in musical form. \nElephant Micah is hazy, lazy and more than a little spacy. The musicians want to come across as making a breezy, summertime meditation. They mix in synthesizers and basic rhythm parts all while sounding spare, and for that they deserve credit.\nBut summer is about doing, not thinking -- activation, not analysis. Elephant Micah sounds not just spare but parched, playing so much with its sound that the bouts of background tape hiss were my problem and not just one band's. When naming the album's first song, "Zzzzzzz. . .", the guys weren't kidding: the album goes on for 18 tracks and over 64 minutes.\nWhen waking up, Elephant Micah laces the album with some imaginative wit. Included is a track called "Mt. Neil Young," which is fun, but I think we all know that if anything is going to be named after Neil Young, it's going to be a hurricane. \n"Deliver Us From Broken Glass," the album's centerpiece track, takes a catchy little riff for an eight-minute ride. After awhile, though, the band just reverts to burying meandering malaise in lo-fi sonics. You'll want to put on Def Leppard or Shakira after you listen to this just to shake you out of it.\nHopefully, your pickup truck has a three-CD changer.