Records are like houseguests. You invite them in and you see what happens. The best ones resemble your worst stay-over pals; you wake up, all the food's left your fridge, god knows whose underwear you have on your head, and there are weird noises you don't want to know about coming from the bathroom. And, though your life is disordered and ruined, you realize that something happened to you, however vague. The record, or guest, showed up, knocked you down, left you banged up and scarred. You're not the same afterwards. You've lived with-- and through-- something, no matter how inconvenient and unclassifiable.

$100 Room is not that sort of record. Kind of like Spitting don't want to be a bother. They don't want to be too loud, or too intense or too worrisome to you or anything. They just made this record, had their friends-- like Sarge's Elizabeth Elmore-- sing on it, and put it out into the world. They sing about love and society and the things that make them nervous, and sort of wonder if you wouldn't too much mind listening to their stuff for a minute.

They've made themselves as hospitable as possible by trying to include something for everyone. You like meandering, steady rhythms? No? Okay, how about feedbacky, Built-to-Spill guitar outbursts? Still not satisfied? How about loud/quiet/loud dynamics? Or maybe quiet/loud/quiet suits you better. They have those, too. All they want is a little bit of your time.

Trouble is, Kind of like Spitting are so hung up on their manners that there's no way for them to really project. Though it's pleasant from time to time to listen to a band who aren't dead set on being the ruling fact of your universe, records like this aren't truly capable of commanding your heart. And if you don't want a record that's built around an inexorable urge to communicate, there are plenty of other things-- other records, baseball, talking with people, sex, etc-- to which you can turn your attention.

None of this is a huge problem, really. The singing here is wispy and gravelly at the same time, and the songs are constructed from smooth, slightly gawky jazz progressions you'd hardly begrudge the guys. But something like this, made to such a degree from bits of other records and delivered with such wan, unconfrontational performances, doesn't make for much emotional involvement.

It's going to be hard to say no, of course. $100 Room has such a puppy-dog look of unpretentious affection on its mug, you can't help but want to take it home and nurture it and hope it'll blossom into something larger, grander and more demanding. A record like this, inexplicably, makes the listener pine for something more annoying, or something that will beg you to listen to it more closely. Instead, $100 Room falters a bit at the end, falls into a cute, serviceable Billy Bragg cover, and calls it a day. Records like these are like unfailingly polite houseguests: they may leave your house as if they were never there, but sometimes you want a record to hit your dog, make out with your significant other and pee on your houseplant. At least that way you know they were there.

-Sam Eccleston