Personnel: Pinback (recorder); Rob Crow (vocals, guitar, cello, keyboards, percussion, drum programming, scratches); Armistead Burwell Smith IV (vocals, guitar, keyboards, drum programming); Tom Zinser (drums).

Audio Mixer: Pinback.

Someone passed a law a while back that every band must have a side project -- or two -- instead of living and dying within their own confines. So it is that this duo shares members with the estimable Three Mile Pilot. For once, however, there's ample inspiration to go around, as this LP is a fine little feather in the caps of Armistead Burwell Smith IV and Rob Crow. The album is a bit of a one-trick-pony, with little to distinguish texturally between one song and the next, but what a nice little trick it is. Tempos are slow while not succumbing to heaving slowcore, atmospheres are gentle without being glib, the sound is direct but not blunt. As guitars pick deliberately like roosters picking up seed, and drums and bass pitter-patter, the vocals come in with two-part harmonies and double-tracked melodies that winnow along with the leisurely air. An unobtrusive beauty like fall foliage in New England is created, with the hint of winter around the corner in the occasional nippy organ or more knelling rhythm ("Crutch"). Good. ~ Jack Rabid

San Diego's Pinback is an unassuming trio that creeps up on you in powerful ways. Like a scent that has the power to transport one to another time and place, Pinback's music is rich in powerful and transcendent glimpsed memories. The images on the cover and inside of the CD booklet are a series of vacation snap shots. These images of distant trips that somebody else took capture the nostalgia that comes from thinking about the rapid passage of time. Pinback was formed by songwriters Rob Crow and Armistead B. Smith IV, who write songs that comfort through an ethereal richness. Simple melodic figures repeat and become layered, leading a listener along pathways strewn with the melancholy of lost love and fragmented dreams. Lush vocals drift in and out of the instrumental backing like fish through an underwater garden.