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SAY HI: The Wishes And The Glitch [Euphobia]

The fifth record from the one-man outfit previously known as Say Hi To Your Mom is about as bedroom-band as they come. Judging from its lyrical content, there have been long stretches of down time in Eric Elbogen’s bedroom lately. Love lost, love longed-for, love misplaced, love mislaid, love otherwise absent or unaccounted for—every damned song deals with a variation on the grand theme. Even at a brief half-hour and change, The Wishes And The Glitch starts to verge on the banal. What saves it, sort of, is the album’s expansive musical approach. Awash in echo and occasionally saddled with a cross-rhythmic drum-machine track, the music manages to be both open and claustrophobic. Song by song, the approach works, making Wishes sound like the sparse, cold thoughts that flit through your head after a bad breakup. The album reaches its most successful balance of these elements on the chugging “Back Before We Were Brittle,” the keening “We Lost The Albatross” and the willfully enigmatic “Magic Beans And Truth Machines” (at a scant two minutes, it’s the best song here). Still, you wish Elbogen had pared it down a little further; there’s a good EP in here, but not quite enough to prop up even a short album. [www.ilikesayhi.com]

—Eric Waggoner