Lost In the Pancakes

On Lost in the Pancakes, his third album under the Pipes You See, Pipes You Don't moniker, Peter Erchick finds his uniqueness in the shadow of nearly utter familiarity. A modest production, especially compared to the scope of his Elephant 6 cohorts, Erchick's piano-based pop makes use of familiar melodies in a bittersweet way not dissimilar to the late Harry Nilsson. Indeed, Erchick — who also plays keyboards in the Olivia Tremor Control, and OTC leader Will Cullen Hart's follow-up band, the Circulatory System — turns out ten songs somewhere between resignation and redemption. Numbers like the album-opening title cut (which declare the singer "lost in the pancakes for years and years") and its following number, "Wake Myself to Sleep" ("there's a drunken siren's call/I don't answer it anymore") are somehow defiant in their ringing catchiness, only underscoring some of their most desolate sentiments. Lost in the Pancakes isn't about desolation or triumph, though, so much as the small melodies that murmur out of memory, the weary tunes one might invent to sing to himself on a long walk home after a long night, simply because a long walk needs such weary tunes. Erchick is an enormously gifted melody writer, and the tunes still carry weight in the morning. Though filled out by his usual band of Athens cohorts — including Olivia Tremor Control bandmates Eric Harris and Bill Doss, Circulatory System's Heather McIntosh and Derek Almstead, and others — Pipes You See places less emphasis on experimentation for its own sake. Though it's not to say each song doesn't come loaded with rich arrangements and textures. The album-closing "The Next Anything," builds into a celestial wall of horns, strings, and vocals. Beatles comparisons might abound, as they often do for Elephant 6-related projects, and there's good reason for it, but Lost in the Pancakes is Erchick's own, something new sung with the distant inflection of modern pop's Liverpudlian mother tongue.