Ghost

In feel and spirit, Tape Deck Mountain has the aura of gloomy Northwest afternoons spent locked in a home studio. Actually, the band is a vehicle for San Diego-based multi-instrumentalist Travis Trevisan. His debut album Ghost is darkly insular in mood, filled with chasm-deep echoes, thick feedback and baffling tape-loop chatter. Within its bleak emotional confines, Trevisan manages to range from hazy dreampop landscapes (“Scantrons,” “Bat Lies”) to more concise, sparsely rendered pieces (“On My Honor”). Narcotized psychedelia rears its retro head in the seething “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie.” At times, sonic details — such as the splashy drums on “80/20” or the meandering guitars on “F-“ — count for more than underlying words or melodies. Lyrically, Tape Deck Mountain is a disquieting place, filled with morbid romantic musings (“In the Dirt”) and disembodied confessions (“Ghost Colony”). Trevisan 's flat, spacey vocal delivery adds to the pervasive sense of free-floating alienation. It's amazing that all that California sunshine could produce something as brooding as Ghost.