Brad Laner: Neighbor Singing

"Find Out," the opening track

of Brad Laner's debut solo album Neighbor Singing, swipes a guitar flourish and a bit of vocal melody

from The Byrds' "Eight Miles High." From there, though, it plummets headfirst

into the future: An immaculately dense studio construction, the disc takes

ping-pong psychedelia to rarely realized levels of intricacy. As the man behind

Medicine and Amnesia, Laner is no stranger to lush, layered pop. But Neighbor, for better and for worse, often sounds

like three Laner albums being played at once: "June Gloom" is an overload of

dream-rock serotonin, and "Alambres" tinkers almost haphazardly with laidback

harmony, fluttery strumming, and tufts of ambience. Laner's mad yet amiable

genius wanders in and out of focus throughout Neighbor; if he could have eased back on the knobs just a

little, his gorgeous tunes might have had more of a chance to surface.