Leviethan, Monuments in Memory of Nothing So Far (Emeritus Records)

[August 15th, 2007]

[KID-IN-A-CANDY-STORE ROCK] An album need not be perfect to be enjoyable (perfection being so boring, anyway). And Levi Ethan Cecil’s debut release as Leviethan, Monuments in Memory of Nothing So Far , flutters in the open air between enjoyable and perfect for 34 straight minutes. From the opening, Zeppelin-esque guitar and air-powered organ of “Guy Plain” to the threatening piano and fuzzy strums of closer “A Little Dyslexic,” Monuments in Memory is as compelling as anything in recent memory.

The album’s most endearing quality is that—despite being more than a little somber—it sounds like it was a lot of fun to record. Like a kid in a candy store, Cecil (who also plays bass for parlor-pop outfit Heroes and Villains) experiments with every instrument in the (home) studio, be it acoustic or electric. He employs delay pedals and creates eerie echo chambers. Most notably, Cecil regularly doubles and triples his vocal tracks in courageous fashion, his girlish falsetto (don’t let the scruff fool you) running laps alongside its lower-register incarnations. On “This Town That Town,” Cecil layers these mutant vocals atop one another to haunting effect, his cloned siren singers repeating, “Poison mind gets quite unsightly/ Poison idea crept inside thee,” while high-pitched doot-doots round out the choir.

But Monuments in Memory ’s lyrical turns can be markedly less memorable than its musical ones. Cecil routinely chooses strict but senseless rhymes to move his songs, like confusing dreams, along to each next, musically awesome section. On “Warm…And Mandatory,” Cecil admits, “I don’t know what this means,” before adding another incongruous lyrical turn: “You give me your disease, as you please”.

But even Leviethan’s strongest lyrics and greatest one-liners (“One hit for this wonder, please,” or ”In the end, it’s their call/ And they ain’t calling you”) are dwarfed by the album’s adventurous song structures and painstaking production. Monuments in Memory sounds alternatingly like a big-budget psychedelic-rock production from the late ’60s and a neo-folk gem that might wind up the apple of Pitchfork’s eye. It sounds, most of all, like a labor of true love—making its imperfections real easy to overlook.