[04.03] Folk music—the kind made with guitars, a scribble pad, pot and whole afternoons of idle time—has never really gone away. And while it's played second fiddle to breakbeat and electronica as poster boy for the home studio movement, it has mutated in some delightful ways as the age of the independent artist continues to flourish. Pothole Skinny's Time Shapes The Forest Lakes is certainly a folk record in the layman's sense. There's plaintive guitars and tentative vocal melodies delivered with reserve and self-conscious intellectualism—the formula that has fueled every distillate of Anglo-Appalachian song through Dylan Nick Drake. But it's also twisted through a lens that looks fondly backward on the less prominent mutations that have taken place since the haphazard primitivism of Jandek and Syd Barrett, the zen repetition of Karutrock and Eno and the instrumental playfulness of psych-folk.

What makes Time Shapes The Forest Lake enjoyable is how it reflects its own time through those same component parts. It is a somber, wan and weary record—an artifact for tired times. But the record's weariness, at least on an instrumental and atmospheric level, is far from tiresome. "Dream of the Labia Lament," for instance, works spare electric and acoustic guitar lines around a tenor banjo loop that Daniel Lanois might have employed in one of his film scores had he been there first. And the pastoral gothic themes implicit in the arrangement are eerily heightened by the presence of a creaking rope that could be a lazily rocking boat, but is likely something entirely more sinister. "Antique Gasoline" achieves a similar spooky effect, creeping like a meditation on a 500-year-old English folk theme twisted up in a slow tangle of harmonium and cello.

Where Time Shapes…bogs down is in its vocal passages. "The Sussex Railroad Song," which may be the best of the sung contributions, evokes Isn't Anything era My Bloody Valentine in its best moments, but would probably benefit from the psychedelic haze and melodic sense that defines MBV's unique vocal interplay. More often than not, Time Shapes…vocal melodies and delivery are a bit ugly and narrow—recalling the pointless ironic delivery that fouled so much independent pop over the last 10 years. Worse, they often spoil otherwise well conceived instrumental passages—such as the delightfully lazy guitar interplay on "Scroll of Westport Quay," which is fouled by the transition to a rudimentary, sing-song verse that follows the backing melody much too literally.

Interestingly, several tunes marred by Pothole Skinny's less-than-crafty vocals often return to beautifully textured, extended instrumental passages that transform the melody entirely. As a technique that appears throughout the record, it's an effective and welcome vehicle for transport. It also begs the question whether this is dynamic by design, fouled by a basic homeliness in Pothole Skinny's vocal delivery, or a misevaluation of their own strengths.

Because what ultimately draws the listener back to this record is how the promise of this collective's textural sense always seems to peek like sun from behind the clouds. It's a strength Pothole Skinny would be wise to cultivate further as they head further into the mysterious twilight on their own road to folk mutation. —Charles Saufley