[01.04] The opening strains of Castle Oldchair's 30-minute debut album, Sad Pants, are weird and pretty. The short song is "Backwards (Running River)," and on it, he has recorded lead and harmony vocals backwards. He hasn't just taken a vocal track and flipped it, but has written the melody in reverse and learned the sounds phonetically to sound intelligible in the other direction. At least, it really sounds like that what's he did. Yet, each word is clear and distinct.

It's a peculiar obsessiveness that would carry this idea through so successfully, and it launches the record beautifully. Castle (that's his name) is described as a slight little wisp of a guy who tours by himself, playing acoustic sets throughout the midwest and drinking cases of cheap, "hillbilly-piss" beer.

Listening to Sad Pants, the sound is consistent with that brief character sketch. The arrangements are lean and wiry, with a tipsy wobble to the playing. His guitar playing evokes marathon drives through the flat fields of Indiana or Illinois. A certain comfortable smeariness washes through the whole session, like a wine stain rubbed into a wooden tabletop. The record is saddled with an unfortunate title, though—when I heard that it was an all-acoustic record called Sad Pants," I was half-dreading a dreary, mopey, Saddle Creek ripoff. The album art perpetuates this fear, too. It looks like Shel Silverstein drew on a cardboard box after his cat died, and left that box out in the rain overnight. I was pleased to find that Castle avoids the melancholic navel-gazing that plagues many acoustic singer-songwriters these days, even when he's singing about worms.

The rest of the album is more straightforward than its start, unfortunately, but it has moments of greatness. "Swallowing Stars" has a loping bounce to it that encourages plenty of repeated listens. And the creepy tenth song that hides at the end is a cool, experimental bookend to "Backwards (Running River)," with its many tracks of tape-mangled vocals, accompanied only by a banjo-type pluck.

The only track I found myself skipping was "Circles," on which Castle edges perilously close to the sorority-girl whisperfolk of guys like Jack Johnson and John Mayer. The melody is a bit pat, and the emotion comes across as affectation. Thankfully, this is the only song on Sad Pants that could be played on MOR radio.

Castle Oldchair does the acoustic singer-songwriter gig better than most. He has a sure sense of melody, and he's smart with his arrangements -- not too sparse, but never flowery. Sad Pants would sound good with your Sunday morning pancakes, or played loudly on a drive across the Great Plains. —Kevin Seal