Though Chestnut Station's In Your Living Room is a well-executed example of its form, it's not the sort of record one can feel comfortable recommending to a particularly large audience. As an indie rock semi-supergroup, Chestnut Station are an abject failure. As a live record, In Your Living Room is hardly thrilling. And the album also sinks to the bottom of the heap, as collections of bubblegum and R&B; obscurities go. But somehow, it seems, without question or quarter, the single finest live collection of bubblegum and R&B; obscurities ever recorded by an indie rock semi-supergroup.

Chestnut Station is masterminded-- though using terms like "masterminded" with groups as willfully dumb as Chestnut Station is probably unfair-- by Rian Murphy, frontman and Chicago scenester without parallel. He's conscripted such luminaries as ex-Coctail Mark Greenberg to tickle the ivories and Eleventh Dream Day six-stringer Rick Rizzo to back him here, and, for such avatars of defiantly smart-guy rock, it's not the readiest fit in the world. Like the Station's debut EP, a collection of songs named after the titles of five movies on a certain theater marquee, In Your Living Room exists to be silly and ephemeral. Where the EP found the band in a vaguely countryish mood, the new album focuses more on soul music, adding a pair of horn players and tackling songs about different dances and love gone bad.

Rizzo, for one, benefits from the recontextualization, if only because he's liberated from Eleventh Dream Day's occasional over-seriousness. His leads here are probably wasted on such a decidedly one-off project, even if their fluidity and looseness would never fit into something he headed himself. The rest of the band plays with straight-faced aplomb, and only Murphy's perhaps too-exuberant delivery tips the listener off that, despite the Drag City insignia on this puppy, R&B; cover bands will most likely not be the next big thing once the abstracto-jazz craze winds down.

Ultimately, despite its considerable, dippy charms, Chestnut Station can grate for precisely that reason. The band's enthusiastic readings sometimes seem like part of an extremely arch joke, and the competence with which they play, at times, seems to mock the earnestness of the occasion. When Murphy dedicates a track to the audience, you laugh with him, but when he criticizes their applause, tongue-in-cheek, as hollow, you kind of want to smack him. Because, however surprising it is that Chi-town hipster staples make for a pretty good party band with a goofy live record on Drag City, it's still a little frustrating that a lot of better ones, deprived of necessary cachet, didn't get the chance to try.

-Sam Eccleston