A guy, a girl, and a guitar: like Lou Reed said, the possibilities are endless. The results are also almost always a lot more interesting than this. Apparently, Dan Littleton, the Alpha Male of the indie folk group Ida, and Tara Jane O'Neil, ex-fill-in-the-blank (Rodan, the Sonora Pine, Retsin), felt that, after touring extensively together with their own respective songs, they should take that big next step and become more-than-tourmates. So they made an album together. Sure, they knew it would be awkward at times, and that their friends might think they were weird, but you know what? You can't blame the kids for trying. Every time they sat down before that four-track, they must have gazed sweetly into each others' eyes, whispered "no regrets", and started banging morosely on their instruments.

Actually, despite song titles suggestive of upper-crust adolescent crushes ("Juliette", "The Langorous Girl", "Sweet Neck") and the general mood of tentativeness that these instrumentals invoke, you get the sense that O'Neil and Littleton are pretty confident in what they're playing, that each string-pop and off-key note, however random-sounding, was intentional on some level. That, however, is about the best thing they've got going for them here. Perhaps it's that grim determinism that sinks this (and marks this) as an attempt at improvised music from two singer/songwriters. Almost every piece opens with one guitarist playing a very simple figure at a mournful tempo while the other pokes around on his or her fretboard, sometimes tonally, sometimes prettily, most times not. And, well, they pretty much just go on like that.

Sometimes they substitute other instruments for the guitars (murky keyboards, a vibraphone, etc), but they're basically filling the same roles. In time (unless, in the name of fragmentation, the pieces cut out suddenly in the middle, as many tend to do), O'Neil and Littleton introduce very subtle changes in the atmosphere, but "time" here means around six minutes, minimum. The two give themselves an awful lot of space, temporally and sonically, but they rarely do anything meaningful with it.

Improvisation usually means that the unexpected can happen; here, things quickly become all too familiar. Which is not to say that the static approach never works; "The Disembodied Juliette" manages to swell beautifully without ever really changing (aside from the entrance of a few well-placed, distorted vocals near the end), and the hints of electronic texture added to "The Langorous Girl" set it apart from the rest of the general sparseness. However, when O'Neil and Littleton had to do so little to get so much more out of these two pieces, it's a wonder they didn't do the same with the rest.

The oddball song, a gentle French-pop pastiche called "Ooh La La...", coaxes twee-as-hell vocals from both participants into a formlessly slight, sweet melody. Now, I don't pretend to speak French, but I feel vaguely like I'm being cheated; lines like "parfait Curvoisier de montage" sound like they could just be meaningless collages of Franglish words. Could I find deeper meaning if I dug into the song? Is this just a bunch of crap O'Neil and Littleton pasted together? Are they making little boy/girl twitters at me as I listen? The song, like the album, doesn't convince me to care either way.

-Brendan Reid, October 3rd, 2002