Pitchfork

Years ago, when I worked at Blockbuster Music for a summer, I scoffed at its laughably broad, sociologically pointed categories. Pop/Rock. Rap/r&b. Dance/Techno. This was the best they could do? There was a Punk endcap display (Daft Punk featured prominently) and, amazingly, two rows of DC Go-Go (my manager was a fan), but there was still much room for improvement. It is the privilege of the young to believe that simple solutions can solve complicated problems, and I decided to devise more accurate categories.

Complications immediately arose. Should Less Than Jake be filed under Ska, or Punk? Or Ska-Punk? Would I be allowed to make a section just labeled Crap? Cross-referencing was impossible; I was attempting a Gmail task in a Hotmail world. It is the privilege of the young to abandon any task that provides the slightest resistance, and I did just that. The Zincs take me back to that dilemma: Is Dimmer indie rock, alt.country, or neo-folk? Who knows? That's what the Pop/Rock category's for.

Dimmer is the Zincs' sophomore LP, on which the formerly solo Jim Elkington finds himself with a permanent band including members of Fruit Bats and Euphone. It's a really solid record, unassuming yet memorable, subtle: It's mildly melancholy, modestly dark, and discreetly brooding. Its most striking feature is Elkington's voice, a wry bass vibrato wrapping around sardonic lyrics. "Before I became a smoker, I used to sniff paint in my fathers shed/ With my passion for ingesting toxins, I felt by 13 that I'd be dead," Elkington deadpans over the ominous glissandos of "Stay in Your Homes". It would be pretty easy to mistake Dimmer for a Smog record.

But repeated listening reveals a deeper, more imbricate bed of influences. I'd never realized how similar Smog and J. Robbins can sound until I heard "Breathe in the Disease", an enticing dirge where smooth acoustic guitars vie against stabs of dark, messy chords, a subtle electronic haze floats over soundtrack strings, and Elkington's voice sits immovably in the eye of the quiet storm. Like the delicate minuet "Bad Shepherds", with its prickly Spanish guitar, "Breathe in the Disease" at once smacks of Smog and of Burning Airlines's smoldering slowburner "The Surgeon's House".

"Beautiful Lawyers", with its percussive acoustic strum, shushing electronic melody, and reverb embellishments, evokes the neat melodic turns found all over Yo La Tengo's Summer Sun, as do the folk-rock guitars and electro stutter of "Moment is Now!". The opening phrasing of "New Thought" seems an homage to Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire", and the rail-riding ballad "Passengers" checks in with early Cohen and Donovan. The album's overall blend of rustic acoustica and subtle electro resonates with Dave Pajo or Windsor for the Derby, and by yoking all these far-flung stars into a new constellation, The Zincs achieve a distant shimmer that sounds old, feels new, and is distinctly their own.