Love This Time

Those winking Canadians in Buttless Chaps turn in their fourth studio effort with Love This Time (Mint), a quietly determined mishmash of pastoral, character-driven pop songs upgraded with vintage-sounding synthesizers. With the album unified by the wordy, deadpan vocals of Dave Gowans, the Chaps' music is free to roam the hills. They happily approximate country & western, geeky white-boy funk, or irony-free indie pop without care; indeed, the album moves from the gothic, Handsome Family-style novella "Lonely Hearts" directly into the awkward, rejiggered new wave Molly Ringwald tribute "Fresh Horses." But even here, amidst spazzy pink-toned organs and references to Judd Nelson, decidedly real violins and cellos churn out an urgent backbeat. In this way, Buttless Chaps suggests the erudite grandiosity of Lambchop. Lost among the banjos and Americana (Canadiana?), however, is an insistent fascination with technology and human circuitry. A robotic voice professes it's falling back into love with a simple human girl (guest vocalist Ida Nilsen) on "Love This Time"; the Cylon asks his carbon-based life form lover, "Would you remember me, or will you decide to change and press erase?" This dichotomy between the organic and electronic continues throughout Love This Time, and makes for some pretty entertaining if a bit scatterbrained listening.