MAGNET Magazine| Record Review


D+
Mistake

With all the music released into the world each and every Tuesday, it’s hard to give everything due consideration based on time constraints alone. So when a record is best described as, "Eh, like, whatever," and makes a lukewarm ripple between your ears, it’s easy to uncap the teacher’s feared red pen, scrawl a barely passing grade and quickly move on. Based on Mistake, this band’s name is pretty accurate. D+ is the "hometown study group" of Bret Lunsford (Beat Happening), Phil Elvrum (Microphones) and Karl Blau (Captain Fathom), who predictably adhere to K Records’ hit-or-miss musical m.o.: minimal, primitive and simplistic. Led by Lunsford’s country-ish warble (which sounds like it was croaked out while someone stood on his chest), these underachievers play spare-ass songs about the evils of TV, mega-doses of love and skewed patriotism. Vocal interplay, nicely textured percussion and strings are frugally employed on a few of these pale ditties, such as the title track and "You’re So Right." But these elements don’t do enough to boost the band’s overall GPA or erase the feeling that it played hooky a lot while writing Mistake. There’s a fine line between affectingly off-the-cuff minimalism and a half-baked slack effort. This one feels too much like the latter. [K/Knw-Yr-Own, www.knw-yr-own.com]