She Is So Beautiful, She Is So Blonde She Is So Beautiful, She Is So Blonde by: Ed Butler Tue:05-Feb-08 Label: Science Of Sound Year: 2007 WB rating 44 out of 100

Elliot Kozel is a cool name. Exotic, unusual, and it has a z in it. Ko-zel really seems to roll off the tongue. That's what makes it surprising that the frontman for indie-folk-garage group Sleeping in the Aviary decided to adopt a new – and lengthy – moniker for his solo project. This is more confounding because the chosen name She is So Beautiful, She is So Blonde is overly long and kind of pointless, much like She is So Beautiful, She is So Blonde, the album of the same name.

Sleeping in the Aviary produce folksy garage rock with a classically indie aesthetic. Lo-fi, quirky and lyrically verbose, you can positively hear the music bouncing back from the walls of the makeshift recording studio which doubles as a woodworking room on the weekends, and it is this stubbornly primitive approach that Kozel adopts with vigour for She is So Beautiful, She is So Blonde.

Making music in the 21st century on analogue equipment is an increasingly rare event, and should be applauded. While Gotye and his ilk are busily hunched over a laptop downloading the latest sound recording software, Kozel, one imagines, is seated on a stool, banjo/guitar/ukulele in hand, with a lone microphone propped up against a stack of books resting mournfully in front of him. Indeed, on 'Playing Your Guitar', you can actually hear that faint hiss of tape on head that only existed on mix-tapes in the late '80s.

As such She is So Beautiful, She is So Blonde is an attempt at experimental, modern day, folk-inflected psychedelia which falls several lengths short of its target. Replete with directionless instrumentals, it is overlong, cumbersome and self-important, lacking the cohesiveness required when making high-calibre psychedelic rock. Too often songs divert into overindulgent meanderings, resulting in directionless and uncommonly beige music. And when these experimentally oblique detours combine with Kozel's lo-tech approach, things just get awkward. 'Crimes (gutter scent)' opens promisingly enough, with a Mercury Rev-ish introduction, all twisted keys, computer-distorted drums and distant vocals, before everything takes an inexplicable left-turn about two minutes in, all tension and drama the song had created eking away over 45 seconds of unnecessary over-instrumentation.

More bizarre though, is 'Biograph', which, aside from being sloth-like and moderately disinteresting, is positively disturbed, pairing bass-heavy rumblings with the sounds of moaning women. Normally, sounds of climaxing ladies don’t couple well with apocalyptic dirges, and this is no exception. It's like listening to the soundtrack of a particularly perverse snuff film.

It's not all bad, however. The rare shining moments when Kozel tightens things up and stays on message are notable, if only for their superiority to the listless instrumentals and aimlessly floating aural scenery. 'On the Bus' is a charming little number, taking everything Neil Young ever wrote and dunking it in a vat of (diluted) acid, it's where the wandering nature of She is So Beautiful, She is So Blonde seems to make sense, evoking dusty highways and empty landscapes, whether that was the intention or not. At 3.22, it's the shortest vocal track on the album, and this brevity mercifully prevents any diversions into self-indulgence.

Likewise, opening track 'Days', features Kozel wielding a ukulele with intent (an attribute all-too-sorely missing from the album at large), a sparse, yet pervasive rhythm section and judiciously unfurled backing vocals, it's concise, pointed and oddly catchy, kind of a tripped-out Iron and Wine, complete with ten buck keyboard effects. It's far and away the best song here, unfortunately making the glaring absence of anything to match its uniqueness even more obvious.

Like most of the songs on She is So Beautiful, She is So Blonde, the album itself is directionless and uncomfortable, like the coked-up vagrant passing you by blabbering nonsensical gibberish occasionally interspersed with coherent sentences. There is enough here to suggest that Kozel shouldn't pack it in, but perhaps he needs his bandmates to keep his more idiosyncratic tendencies in check.