Creature Automatic - Dust Clouds May Exist (2015)

If you want your band to be able to play anything, you need a guy like Robbie Lee. He can play anything from guitar to saxophone to crumhorn, and his discography includes appearances with Neil Michael Hagerty’s Howling Hex, Jozef Van Wissem’s Heresy Of The Free Spirit, and Eleanor Friedberger. And when he’s done playing on your record, he can also master it. If you go to his website, it bears the legend, “Robbie Lee makes noise.” But when he takes on the title Creature Automatic, noise takes a back seat to songs.

Lee’s own songs are more stylistically focused than you might expect from the breadth of his background. He’s a classicist, evidently influenced by a pantheon that includes the Velvet Underground, Richard Thompson, Van Dyke Parks, and most particularly the Beatles. And not just any Beatles, but the music they started making after they quit playing live and started weaving claviolines and mellotrons into their tunes . Each song on Dust Clouds May Exist is a sound world unto itself. “Interstate Ex” has the same sort of tentative, inward-looking quality as Alastair Galbraith’s music, at least until some free jazz reeds muscle their way into the mix. With its reverberant rhythm guitar, wandering piano, and shards of feedback, “Under The Arc Light” applies the best sounds from a few Nico records to a melody that could have been lifted from an old Kinks record. And “The 10:04” scuffs up the heavy-booted dance-and-drone of Richard Thompson c. Henry The Human Fly.

About now you might be ready to pose the question that always came back to stymie Charlie the Tuna; we know you got good taste, but do you taste good? It’s fair to say that Lee’s skills as an arranger and player eclipse his songwriting but only because the sonic elements are so strong that they keep drawing attention away from the tunes and the words. So the lumbering drums and lonely accordion eclipse whatever he has to say about lost technologies on “Antikythera,” and the fact that the melody to “Chytrid, My Chytrid” is a close kin to “After The Gold Rush” registers more strongly than his depiction of amphibian population collapse. But if you think that music is for hearing and feeling, and aren’t so concerned about a clear message, Mr. Lee is at your service.