Okay

Marty Anderson is a Berkeley, CA bedroom recording artist who knows his way around both psychedelic folk and broken-hearted pop via Zen meditations. The circular melodies on Huggable Dust embrace clutches of repeated lyrics about love, usually of the lost variety. Like an obsessive-compulsive person pacing a dusty apartment, Anderson’s basic acoustic ideas grow more interestingly dishevelled with the addition of electronic flakes and grander instrumental ideas with each subsequent pass. The lyrics gain power from their initial awkwardness, turning spell-like with repeated incantations. Sung in Anderson’s dry creak of a voice (imagine Devendra Banhart crossed with Carol Channing), they are a mantra for the dumped, spinning alternate scenarios in his head, and the perfect fodder for obsessive pop fans. However, the album is a little like a good phone conversation that ends clumsily and right between the tracks "Panda” and "Blind” the new ideas dry up with another eight songs to go. Still, "Truce” and the title track mostly make up for the overstaying.