"Find Out," the opening track
of Brad Laner's debut solo album Neighbor Singing, swipes a guitar flourish and a bit of vocal melody
from The Byrds' "Eight Miles High." From there, though, it plummets headfirst
into the future: An immaculately dense studio construction, the disc takes
ping-pong psychedelia to rarely realized levels of intricacy. As the man behind
Medicine and Amnesia, Laner is no stranger to lush, layered pop. But Neighbor, for better and for worse, often sounds
like three Laner albums being played at once: "June Gloom" is an overload of
dream-rock serotonin, and "Alambres" tinkers almost haphazardly with laidback
harmony, fluttery strumming, and tufts of ambience. Laner's mad yet amiable
genius wanders in and out of focus throughout Neighbor; if he could have eased back on the knobs just a
little, his gorgeous tunes might have had more of a chance to surface.