Brutal's cover art will be utterly ancillary to, if not totally absent from, the listening experience of the vast majority who hear it. Like most of today's self-released albums, the best way to access Clear Tigers' first LP is via eMusic and iTunes (and, of course, torrent sites) and fans will know its cover-- if they know it at all-- as an inscrutable 100-pixel square thumbnail. But Brutal may be as good an argument as any for buying the physical artifact, as its uncanny iconography-- a tiger-masked, singlet-wearing, rifle-toting dude astride a white steed against a Photoshopped ocean set-- succinctly sums up its various virtues and demerits. Like its cover art, the album can be dreamlike, thrilling, menacing, and WTF-ludicrous.

Clear Tigers is Brooklynite Nathan Akin, who plays and sings (including some inventive backing vocals) everything. In "Spookhouse", a fraught folktronic reminiscence of Halloweens past, Akin chants in a weary, nasal sing-song over soap-bubble synths and torrid piano runs. Leavened with humor, the song nevertheless legitimizes childish anxieties by enumerating actual dangers: mothers "scared into submission by the razor-blades in apples," children carving pumpkins that "look like sex offenders who live just around the corner," and spook houses haunted by every grade school shorty's greatest terror-- teenage bullies. Other tracks, including opener "Vacation", which declares (albeit politely) over a throbbing guitar, "You're not gonna take it/ Gonna start a revolution," are as richly informed by a child's hunger for control and personal agency. "Igloo", the album's best cut, rubs together shivering electronic and acoustic instruments and shuffles fleeting, fuzzy images to powerfully express that paradoxical feeling of jouissance and powerlessness, the push and pull of wanting to grow up/never grow up.

Unfortunately, Akin's childhood source material isn't always so fertile. "Won't Be Back" and "Summer School" are sludgy grunge slabs that may fill in autobiographical gaps (betcha Akin idled his formative years air-guitar soloing to Mudhoney and the Smashing Pumpkins), but lack the courage of their convictions and come off as smarmy parody. Worse, plunked down next to one another in the center of the album, they KO any momentum and good will earned in the album's otherwise solid first half.

Which may be just as well. After this grave error of sequencing, Brutal is basically a compost heap of recycled ideas-- exhausted folk strummers, an Elliott Smith knock-off, and what sounds like an Animal Collective 7" played at 78. The achy, shimmering "Deathray" is the exception, and if you cordon off it and Brutal's first five tracks, you've got a good EP. Hey, you're downloading this thing anyway-- just order it à la carte.