Mt. Wilson Repeater, the solo project of Radar Bro Jim Putnam, is an elusive creation, at times calling up guitar-fueled landscapes and at others dropping into a blissed-out rhythmic pattern apt for sound-tracking pensive moments on public transpo. (Their debut is perhaps the only album out this year that can, at various points, evoke both Led Zeppelin and Air.)
 

 “Out Country Way” feels like a calling card, bringing together the disparate elements of Mt. Wilson Repeater into the confines of one relatively sprawling piece: strummed guitar, keyboard drone, Putnam singing roundabout lyrics plaintively (“And while I wait at home for you/I’ll sit and wait here at home for you”). Guitars fade into the sound of a train, and the train recedes into drone: It feels at times less like a song and more like a radio play. Its bicameral structure, divided by that almost-fade; the handful of words sung by Putnam that proceed in a circular pattern. The roundabout is the point, evidently; the elliptical journey is actually the destination. Alternately, these could be seen as offhand words, tossed off—but there’s something about Los Angeles that seems to inspire a select and surreal group of artists (maybe like novelist Steve Erickson) and Putnam’s words and music here tread that same border between the mundane and the unexplainable.

Track titles:
1. Canmtady
2. Out Country Way
3. Island In The Sun
4. Pencils / Pens
5. Basketball Song
6. All Night Everyday
7. The Conversation
8. Everyone Say Hello
9. In The Teeth Of A Whale
10.  Maid Marion
11.  Tether In The Haze

All songs written and performed by Jim Putnam.

Recorded and mixed in Phase Four Recording Facilities, Artwater, California by Jim Putnam.
 

All songs published by Pacific Electric.