"Take a deep breath. Wiggle your toes in the sand. Welcome to San Diego. Seventy miles of uncrowded beaches, majestic parks, perfect sunsets, world-famous activities, world-class shopping and cultural events await your exploration. Our sunny weather is as comfortable as the people are friendly. So pack your favorite shorts and get some fun out of life."
--San Diego Convention and Visitor's Bureau

Although I have no reason to believe that Three Mile Pilot's tenure in San Diego is based on anything other than choice; listening to their 2xCD compilation of 7"s and rarities, Songs from an Old Town We Once Knew, it's difficult to believe the album isn't the documentation of a music of exile. When I saw Pall Jenkins perform with his other project, the Black Heart Procession, he was wearing amber-vision glasses and a visor inside the club. I guess it's possible that these trappings were evidence of a long day spent wiggling his toes in the sand, but he didn't look comfortable with the minimal stage lights, let alone real sunlight. If not exiles, Three Mile Pilot are outsiders at least, assuming the role of a guardian storm cloud resting above that nightmarish, perpetual beach holiday that California natives euphemistically refer to as "San Diego."

There are few pieces of sound out there that can be described as both avant-garde and easy listening. Three Mile Pilot pull off this feat by losing rigid rock song structures, while keeping the rhythmic lulls and swells, and those pleasurably manipulative repetitious builds. Most of these songs are constructed around the bass, but the band's move away from guitar- centered arrangements doesn't sacrifice melody-- the pop hooks aren't abandoned, just put in their place. The result is unquestionably unconventional music that goes down easier than the experimental pill often does; this isn't the "weird stuff" relegated to headphones and time alone, it's the "weird stuff" that your housemates will first tolerate, and then borrow.

Three Mile Pilot's trick isn't in dismantling familiar rock lullabies before pasting them back together. Instead, they bend, stretch, and scribble all over them, careful to leave points of identification to keep them accessible. So, it's an aptly titled collection. These are no alien anthems-- they're songs from a town we once knew. The familiar is made unfamiliar-- one of Freud's definitions of "the uncanny." Three Mile Pilot are your typical smart pop band melted into something less naïve by the San Diego sun.

It was refreshing to hear less reliance on drum machines on this offering, but I could've done without the prog-rock leanings of the self-indulgent extended piano segments. The signifiers that "this is dark music" are a bit heavy-handed, too. This is especially evident on the second disc's opener, where a sputtering horn laid over pipe organ drones sounds like a dying bird's funeral hymn. Jenkins' vocals also grate after only a few songs-- his sad whine would be more successful if varied with an occasional nervous bark or a false hope set up by happily detached phrases. Radiohead's Thom Yorke emits some of the most tortured utterances on record, but the lingering residue of Yorke's vocal approximation of methodical stasis and flat comfort is what gives those pained cries relevance. Jenkins gives no sign of the vapid, sunny banter that his exile music wants to comment on.

There's a certain comfort in the fact that Three Mile Pilot's dark front of sweeping indie rock melodramas is around to protect the kids whose teen years have been mercilessly trapped in a large-scale game of beach-blanket bingo. But to move beyond the reassurances of well-crafted empathic angst, Three Mile Pilot need to show us their San Diego.

-Kristin Sage Rockermann