Music Box | Overlooked Albums | Loftus

Mike Newmark Columnist

Everyone has had an experience like this: I was browsing the Tonevendor Web site when I happened upon a mysterious CD by a band I’d never heard of—Loftus—that piqued my curiosity. Tonevendor is essentially a clearinghouse for Claire Records, which signs small shoegaze and dream pop bands to their roster, so most of the albums I saw had the same boring descriptions about blissouts, whooshing guitars and comparisons to My Bloody Valentine. Not this one. In the description space, there was a story no more than five sentences long about a man drinking whiskey at his kitchen table, who sees a rat scuttle across his view, shoots at it and wakes up the next morning to find that his son is dead and that he’s run out of bullets. The album was pitch black except for an animal’s jawbone sitting on top of a small gold square, with no identifying information save for the story I’d just read. Naturally, I bought it.

When I removed the CD from its lovingly handcrafted slipcase (Perishable is one of the only labels that still cares about packaging), I was stunned to find that, at least to my ears, the music matched the story almost to a tee. I was clueless as to the musical genre that Loftus specialized in when I purchased the disc, but I expected to hear something rustic, low-key (in a valium-and-alcohol sort of way) and steeped in tension, and that is exactly what I got. As the story suggests, Loftus isn’t best explained by descriptors, but by locales: a provincial middle-American town at nightfall, an old farmhouse overtaken by ivy and moss, the inside of a rusted-out ’72 Crown Victoria with beer cans and ammunition on the seat. The music references a world that only some of us know firsthand but that all of us can easily imagine, and if you close your eyes and shut out everything around you, you may swear you’ve lived there all your life.

Turns out that Loftus was a supergroup/side-project that featured members of Tortoise, Rex and Red Red Meat (which has since become Califone), and they harnessed their respective specialties together in a manner that exceeded the sum of their parts. “Emma’s Rubber Leg” and “When the Light Goes Out in a Submarine,” with their pedal steel guitars and low-slung arpeggios, bridge the gap between country and post-rock more effectively than Califone has managed to do since. Loftus was recorded at drummer Ben Massarella’s truck stop, and the musicians must have taken some selective inspiration from their choice of venue, leaving behind its grimy machinations but accentuating its blue-collar unpretentiousness and Americana feel. Indeed, this is an album that’s meant to be felt rather than understood, one that’s defined by spare, bass-heavy production, empty spaces, and haunting, wobbly vocals like drunken ghosts coming to the surface from out of the past.

The mood that Loftus creates moves up and down, but always in a way that feels expected and not quite comfortable, as though it were residing within one person over the course of a single traumatic day. It’s too tempting, but sometimes I imagine that the music is chronicling the life of the man in that story who in all likelihood killed his own son. The inebriated boogie of “Stolen from a Rifle Clean Brothel,” might be the point at which he believes that it’s not such a big deal, but the two tense slow-burners that follow (“King Carp in a Dan Ryan Ditch” and, appropriately enough, “Nervous”) bring him summarily in contact with his own demons, or perhaps the police. The two-part track, “Bell and Hammer / Penguin Boy’s Love Story,” changes from numbly contented to absolutely devastating at the drop of a hat. But it’s that lump-in-the-throat closer, “Blind,” that takes the story home.

The twanging acoustic guitars contain a twinge of weary hopefulness, and here I picture the man confronting those whom he’s wronged—God, himself, his son in the afterlife—crumbling, and being forgiven.