N.Lannon – Chemical Friends

Listening to Chemical Friends is the aural equivalent of receiving a full-body massage outdoors at twilight in a gently pulsing mid-summer shower while R2-D2 recites Shakespearean sonnets to you in his unintelligible but comforting robotic chirp. San Francisco-based Nyles Lannon (who thought it would be pretty cool to see his first initial in lower-case) has taken a break from his slowcore band, Film School, in order to record the most depressingly gorgeous album since Elliott Smith’s Either/Or. The Smith comparison is a fairly obvious one and doesn’t require a press release to figure out, but there’s a confessional tenor to Lannon’s songwriting here that necessitates a measure of vocal restraint. Fortunately, his voice attains the gossamer pre-dawn quality of Sam Beam’s without veering into the coffeehouse kitsch of Ben Gibbard’s girlish yelp.