Almost three weeks ago, I packed the trusty Saturn with the last of my possessions and headed south on I-5 from my home of the past five years, Portland, Oregon. And since arriving in California's Bay Area nearly half a day later, my life has been on sensory overload. Everything I experience is new. From the shock of inadvertently happening upon a woman relieving herself on the street in the early morning to the beauty of driving over the Golden Gate in the late afternoon (and vice versa), familiarity is rationed in miserly portions to the waking day.

Amidst this somewhat disjointed reality, music is finding the normally clear and well- maintained roads to my consciousness clogged. New and unfamiliar sounds are lost in the shuffle, given bad directions by the locals and parked beside 7-Elevens consulting their maps, while staples find the route clouded by a thick fog. They reach their destination before nightfall only to discover they've been relegated to backdrop. So, even though a pile of as- yet- unreviewed Pitchfork discs stare me in the face each night before I sleep, any impression they may have left upon their last visit to the disc player quickly dissipates.

The funny thing about Whistler's self- titled debut, aside from its new wave- inspired cover art, is the very manner in which it clawed its way onto my brain. A collaboration between EMF's Ian Drench, Kelly Shaw's unadorned vocals and James Topham's violin (which once served Brian Eno), Whistler is primarily a folk- pop outfit. As a listener craving recognition, I was surprised to be drawn immediately to the album's more difficult opener rather than the more easily pegged, but ultimately unremarkable Brit-folk numbers that populate the remainder of the work.

Laying a booming harmonica riff that would make young Springsteen proud across an otherwise eerie post- modern nod to the Velvet Underground and the aforementioned Eno, Whistler steps quickly into the brightest light the recent resurgence of traditional music has to offer, only to just as quickly slink back into the multitudes. "If I Give You a Smile," the record's bold beginning, is the definition of successful new music, combining its seemingly incongruous parts and melding them with enlightened direction. Unfortunately, Whistler dropped off my radar screen pretty quickly after that-- its standard, plodding folk paeans lost in the flood of images and experience that bombard me daily from all sides.

Does the return of my more adventurous musical appetite signal a growing comfort in my surroundings? Perhaps, but more likely-- and here lies a lesson Whistler would be wise to learn-- although familiarity breeds a comfort we all crave, the new and unexplored is ultimately more titillating.

-Neil Lieberman