There's an upside and a downside to the perpetual cheapening of recording equipment. The upside: musicians can begin producing music as soon as they've gathered together a few hundred bucks, and release that music without financial backing from a record company. Thus, musicians are free to pursue whatever musical inclinations they wish, no matter how freaky and/or experimental. The downside: Kelley Stoltz. The Past Was Faster is a collection of mediocre, generally bad lo-fi, about as refined and likeable as a syphilitic chancre.

From the first fuzzy seconds of The Past Was Faster, you can pretty much expect what's to follow: unmelodious, uninteresting four-track music. Kelley Stoltz wants to be Bob Pollard so bad, you can just picture him standing in front of a mirror, swinging a microphone over his head, pursing his lips, and singing "My Valuable Hunting Knife." What Stoltz lacks is the ability to infuse a few chords with the kind of energetic delivery and strong vocal melodies that have made Pollard the veritable indie rock god he's become.

While most of The Past Was Faster is merely lackluster, some of it is absolutely awful. After listening to the faux-country disaster, "The Fog Has Lifted," I'd have to say that Stoltz could be the worst Tom Waits impersonator of all time. Seriously-– rev up a vacuum cleaner for a while, and run an old rag through it, and you get a better Waits impression than Stoltz can pull off.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the album is that every time Stoltz stumbles upon a halfway decent riff, he spends at least three minutes repeating it ad nauseam. After about two minutes of nondescript blandness on "Permafrost," the song breaks into a perfectly serviceable, pretty acoustic guitar riff. But the riff long outstays its welcome-– those same three or four notes repeat over and over again, as if Stoltz is saying to us, "Listen! I finally figured out how to write a song!" To make matters worse, The Past Was Faster's relative best track, a mellow number reminiscent of (but not nearly as good as) new Yo La Tengo, is actually a hidden track, buried deep into the album's last song, "Lonely Star State." And while the track is pretty decent, it certainly isn't worth the effort required to find it.

Yes, this album is not without its pleasant moments. But even when it's pleasant, it's still immensely derivative-- and not nearly as good as the material it rips off. The Past Was Faster plays like one man's botched attempt to try his hand at being a "musician." And when all is said and done, the record is to be taken for exactly what it is-– Kelley Stoltz playing with himself. We can only hope, for his sake, that he's better at that than he is at songwriting.

-Matt LeMay