Pitchfork

In his disarmingly honest liners, Lenzi lists six albums that he feels most influenced the proceedings: Neil Young's After the Goldrush, Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die, Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food, Swervedriver's Mezcal Head and two Springsteen records, Nebraska and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. Honestly, it's not hard to hear how all of these things bubble under the surface of this music, even if none of the songs sound explicitly like any of them -- there's Young in the acoustic guitars, Nebraska in the bleakness, Biggie in the beats, Swervedriver in the shimmering washes of guitar-- though the way it's all mixed together defies easy categorization.

Both discs having stunning openers, Am I Free's "In My Quiet Car" ranking with "Judas Priest Cul de Sac" as one of the greatest post-Fire Show Resplendent tracks. Lenzi's nasal croon hovers with flutes over a wall of acoustic guitar: "Everything large and loud and bright will settle down/ The barking dogs and gusting winds will soon whimper and subside." It sets the tone well for a record that feels like it's trying to come to grips with sorrow and cynicism in order to leave it behind, as though Lenzi wants the death of Resplendent to signal the laying to rest of his own anxieties. "Dust of Luck" leads off the second disc with a quick burst of shimmering Philip Glass-ish texture, but it's just a feint away from the meat of the song, a wash of astral country stuffed with multi-tracked acoustic strumming and searching slide guitar.

He goes for his trademark grab bag on the rest of disc two, flirting with electro-reggae on "A Tourist No More," diving into glitchy anthemics on "Beer Muscles" and cultivating an avant-garde music box effect on the instrumental "Hope". The music has a dramatic sweep to it, but feels as though it's ready to come crashing down at any moment as drums stutter, guitars swerve off course and the tape reaches the saturation point. Lenzi is caught between vehement conviction and self-doubt on "Destiny Afterbirth", declaring "this culture is bullshit" with spitting authority but ending with the question "momma did I do okay?/ Cuz nothing is like what you said it would be like."

Those lines could very well be Lenzi pondering the Resplendent legacy, an output that would fit on two CDs if you squeezed it but that nonetheless covered a barely fathomable range of musical terrain. All of his releases since the Fire Show were produced in limited quantities and none received the attention they deserved, so it's hard not to wonder if there's any bitterness or regret hiding out in those lines. Then again, he also sings "I won't waste another phrase on bitterness and sorrow/ I won't waste another day," so it could be that this is just a new beginning for an innovative, underappreciated musician. Let's hope so.