Sometimes, missing links are better left missing. Shortly after Champaign indie-rockers Castor broke up in 1997, singer/guitarist Jeff Garber and bassist Derek Niedringhaus recorded Take Manhattan as the Big Bright Lights; however, Garber was apparently unsatisfied with the results and shelved the master tapes indefinitely. (Rumor has it that he was persuaded to do so by a certain online music critic-- no, no one from Pitchfork-- to whom Garber had lent a rough mix of the album.) Inevitably, word about the "lost album" spread throughout the usual scenester circles, fueled further by a well-placed namecheck by the Promise Ring on their 1999 album Very Emergency. Because everyone knows that if there's one thing scenesters love, it's incredibly obscure indie-rock trivia.

As Garber's current project National Skyline began to take off, he must have eventually figured that he could sell a few copies of Take Manhattan on the "lost album" angle alone, to say nothing of the Castor/National Skyline connection. Either that, or he was simply tired of having his pals at Mud Records bug him about it. Whatever the case, four years after it was made, Take Manhattan has finally been released. And as it turns out, it's pretty obvious why Garber was reluctant to release it in the first place; compared with Castor's elliptical, chiming-yet-brawny guitar sound, the Big Bright Lights is the most straightforward rock thing he's done. If it had been released when it was supposed to be, Castor fans may have seen it as a disappointing development toward a more conventional sound.

Garber has historically seemed more interested in (or at least better at) textures than actual songs; his attempts at writing proper rock songs ("Never Look Away," "Lay Down for the Stars") come off as competent but uninspired takeoffs on the spacier sounds of Hum or Failure. The real sticking point is his vocals, which never quite match up with the mood of the music; by this point, he's ditched the slackerish bark he used in Castor for the breathy, indelicate falsetto featured on National Skyline releases. Garber has never been a particularly sympathetic singer, though, and can be downright shrill when his voice is pushed up high in the mix, especially on the awkward, tense-when-it-should-be-loose "Dream in Color."

When Garber is messing around with delay effects, he sounds a lot more comfortable, such as on the extremely spaced-out GYBE-length instrumental "NOVA" or the twiddly, plinky ambient drone of "Digital Distortion." These tracks provide some evidence of the direction Garber was really heading in, but Take Manhattan is still far from being able to bridge the gap between Castor's more organic feel and the 21st-century-digital-boy territory of National Skyline. As a rock record, Take Manhattan is curiously soulless, and as a foray into moody electronics, it's unimpressive. When the backstory is more interesting than the album, you might as well just read its reviews and be done with it.

-Nick Mirov