You’ve been warned by your parents, by movies and television, and now you’re gonna hear it from me : looks can be deceiving.  When I first received Marco Panella’s latest, Eastern Landscapes, the press materials made reference to “American Primitive acoustica”, “layered landscapes” and “modal/dissonant jazz” in describing the sound of this LP… these, coupled with the hazy, gorgeous cover photograph, had me absolutely convinced that I was in for some kind of abstract drone-guitar record.  As it turns out, both the descriptions and my assumptions were somewhat off-mark.  Panella, whose previous work has focused on fringe pop and electronics, is actually a dyed-in-the-wool singer/songwriter, one who melds lo-fi, rock, and loose Americana with an intriguingly skewed compositional flare.

On first listen, many of the songs on Eastern Landscapes play like ragged slacker anthems, mostly thanks to Panella’s deadpan vocal delivery, which strikes me as a mixture of the timbre of D.Charles Speer and Soltero’s dogged tunefulness.  Panella isn’t trying to bowl anybody over with histrionics, and there is nary a trace of emotion in his voice on any of this album’s eight tracks; rather, the vocals act more as a base, a mainspring for a series of unpredictable arrangements, song structures and overdubs. Continue reading →