Pitchfork

There's a particular emotional landscape often navigated, or at least invoked, by Low and their ilk, a pubescent wonder detailed in books like Bridge to Terabithia, in movies like Dead Poets Society and The Ice Storm. Small-budget American films and underground music have been increasingly obsessed with this poignancy the last five or so years; tales of rue, regret and interpersonal turmoil are draped in Izod alligators and pastel palettes, scored by affecting tunes from years past, all too easily, temporally evocative. Driven by similar nostalgia, Rivulets singer/songwriter Nathan Amundson laments the purity of lost, innocent, irresponsible youth, when we were sincerely insecure and full of hope. Rainy day, springtime pastiche like this is most often tactlessly exploited by acts like Death Cab for Cutie and Wes Anderson, but to his credit, Amundson does find the line between too-honest exhibition and overwrought melodrama.

Aided by a host of slowcore icons, including Jessica Bailiff, the married two-thirds of Low, and Aarktica's Jon DeRosa (Amundson contributes to his Pale Horse & Rider project), the songs on Debridement alternate between saccharine, teenage wistfulness ("Steamed Glass") and referentially reverbed balladeering, a la Will Oldham and Amundson's biggest supporters ("Cutter" and "Will You Be There"). It's more than obvious that Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker consider him a deserving prodigy, and he enjoys some latitude as their sound hasn't been completely exhausted, but at the end of the day, Rivulets isn't much more than Low's firstborn.

The more ambient departures are equally easy to peg, sounding like Richard Youngs on "Shakes" and "Conversation with a Half-Empty Bottle", and Aarktica on the near-bliss, feedback-tinged "There's Nothing I Can Do". It's the ambience and emptiness of his warehouse blues that reduce Amundson's lyrics to formless, droning melodies, but this works to his advantage, as lines like, "I miss my mother/ I miss my father/ I miss my grandparents/ There's nothing I can do," lead into borderline Dream Academy ha-lay-oh-ma-ma-ma's. Like his friend DeRosa's Aarktica material, the worst thing you can do to this music is pay attention to it-- or, the less you look, the more you find.

Leveling these layered, attended compositions against intent, it becomes impossible to appreciate Debridement as effortless, pure malaise; on closer examination, this is focused bleating, an adorned reassembly of once-pure bedroom ballads. Amundson surely stared out many a rainy window while writing this material, but in needlessly draping these simple, acoustic songs with effects and tertiary, atmospheric instrumentation, he robs them of their intangible honesty. The expanded sonics only relegate him to the samey world of digitally delayed slowcore, where on their own, these naked compositions would resonate more uniquely. Though his lyrics aren't strong enough to support that nudity just yet, Amundson's songs would work better sans the cheap, chic accoutrements; on Debridement, he's following his friends off the bridge.