John Vanderslice

Once upon a time, indie rock thrived on tropes of immediacy and authenticity, "real" sounds in "real" time, no overdubs, no fancy effects, and for God's sake no keyboards. But San Francisco's John Vanderslice, taking inspiration from both Guided by Voices' homespun absurdism and Phil Spector's famous wall of sound, builds his multitracked songs one element at a time -- a wheezing organ here, an overdriven acoustic guitar there, an earthy string section below, and analog fireworks pinwheeling above -- to construct worlds as keenly detailed as the imaginary landscapes in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Actually, pick just about any short-story writer and you can probably find a comparison: Vanderslice's carefully crafted set pieces underpin a powerful narrative sensibility, balancing naturalism and artifice, expression and detachment.

With a creaky voice that's an odd cross between Neil Young and Death Cab for Cutie's Benjamin Gibbard, Vanderslice sings deceptively chipper ditties that belie an uncomfortable darkness. Though they sound like pop songs, clocking in at an average 3 1/2 minutes apiece, the tunes contain an encyclopedic array of subjects, ranging from Vietnam to the Wild West to the battlefields of the Civil War; recurring themes include violence, addiction, and broken homes. The characters in Vanderslice's songs dispense rough justice -- one shoots a bluebird, another kills rebels in Colombia, another leaves a lover in the dust. But the judging's never done, and every bullet seems to ricochet back home, until Vanderslice finally sings, "My family tree is me."

Is Cellar Door autobiographical? It's hard to say, though its litany of disappointments -- a lost sister, an addict mother, a damaged father -- suggests a firsthand knowledge of tragedy. But Vanderslice's storytelling is as slippery as his studio trickery, and in "Promising Actress" he describes a tale as just "a hoax/ Recorded impulses laid, dubbed, and cross-faded." It's fitting that Vanderslice, a talented producer and engineer, would fall back on a metaphor of recording. Confronted with a world as bleak as the one he conjures, it's no surprise he's found comfort in a sanctuary of sound.