NEW AMERICAN ANALOG SET ALBUM IS SOULFUL, MELANCHOLIC, REPETITIVE

And very good, both to my ear and those of the reviewers.

The first album hit in 1996, so American Analog Set is closing in on nostalgia act territory now. They used to be derided for breaking on NPR and having a baby boomer following. "Don't Wake Me" became official boomer comfort music when NPR included it in its September 11th programming. But but nothing cures the arrogance of youth like getting old. To all those 20-somethings who mocked us back then, welcome.

What with changing their label all the time and not maintaining a website, it's hard to find out much about them. When they do speak, the results are unenlightening. I finally found a coherent explanation of what they do musically: "The principle behind music like American Analog Set is this: begin with one thing, change it just a little bit four measures later, change something else four measures later, and in several minutes you’ve got an entirely different song going on."

I always feel a twinge of guilt listening to AmAnSet because melancholia is their baseline mood, which can't be healthy, and it's not like they have a lot of range away from that. Sure, they can do happy melancholia, bemused melancholia, and disappointed melancholia, but even sad melancholia seems a little beyond them (typing "American Analog Set" and "melancholy" into Google yields 548 hits). And even though melancholia is their oxygen (well, some claim love is their oxygen), their intentions and effects are completely away from the blues or what I think of as the melancholic musical tradition (the post-Elizabethans and all that).

But their sensibility is very precise, and I assume it has something to do with this "slacker" thing we heard so much about in the early 90s. It's quite dead now, as the number of busted links on this page attests. Even the godfather has moved on, turning to the more conventional American cultural talismans, rock and death. But that slacker sensibility is still in American Analog Set's music, lingering long after the fact, suggesting that it's not just ok to chill, it's the only thing that really matters.

Fourteen bucks at Amazon, or eight from iMusic if you're into that sort of thing.