American Analog Set

The cover of American Analog Set‘s new Promise of Love is brown, and so is the music — too inorganic to be blue, too lightly played to be black. Set leader Andrew Kenny turned his attention from work on a biochemistry Ph.D. at Columbia to make the new album, and the result sounds more lab-grown than usual. The best songs on the glacially paced album sound like Bob James for fans of Yo La Tengo at its most comatose. They’re electric-piano-centered suicide notes that are all empty threat. The rest of the disc sticks to human-heart tempos and college-radio rhythms, guitar fuzz and bass lines for the carpal-challenged. Kenny’s voice has an appealing threadiness that suits the material, though, and there can never be too much electric piano in downtempo indie rock. On the bill with AmAnSet is Saturday Looks Good to Me, a new Detroit act whose recent All Your Summer Songs is a triumph of beehive revivalism and lo-sci-fi production, a flying saucer attack on the Brill Building. Songwriter Fred Thomas runs his metal detector over the same field Kenny’s group camps on, but as an engineer he makes like Joe Meek sitting in for Phil Spector (with a roster of singers that includes Ted Leo and Tara Jane O’Neil on the disc), thinning out the sound for portable record players without sacrificing the shakers, bells and echoing drums. Brown music and little green men with guitars — Saturday night sounds good to us.