(Empty Cellar)

www.myspace.com/emptycellarrecords

Songwriter Tim Cohen has lately been making a moderate splash with psychedelic Fresh & Onlys, his garage-psychedelic collaboration with Shayde Sartin of Skygreen Leopards. That band is already on track for two records in 2009, the first, a self-titled, out this spring, the second, Grey-Eyed Girls, coming in September. Two a year is a pretty good pace, but, apparently, not enough to use up all Cohen's written material. His solo LP, a vinyl-only dozen songs, serves as a kind of musical sketchbook, its line-drawn surreal imagery wrapped in home-recorded echo and low-budget Beach Boys harmonies. The Two Sides of Tim Cohen is sparser, eerier and more acoustic than either Fresh & Onlys album, bearing roughly the same relation to full-band efforts as Barrett solo to Pink Floyd, or Tyrannosaurus Rex to T. Rex.  Several of the songs - "Haunted Hymns" and "Burn My Martyr" for instance - sound a good deal like earlier Cohen's work with Black Fiction, freeform folk phantasms floating on prefab hip hop-ish beats, a la "I Spread the Disease".   

An inward-looking, vague and dreamlike aura hangs over these dozen songs, with sheer musical prettiness often coinciding with disturbing lyrical imagery. Starter "Amazing Visions" has a translucent quality, guitar strums and lightly breathed vocals coalescing in narcotic clouds. Its lyrics, though, incorporate unsettling descriptions of birds and worms entering and exiting various body cavities, a meditation either on creativity or death or both. Gorgeous closer "Warriors & Clowns" is similarly dream-ridden, flutters and bursts of guitar picking under ghostly murmurs about enraged bulls, lovers and fighters. There are quasi-pop songs in between, skewed but more structured. "Unjeweled Splendor" bangs out four-four piano chords in praise of female beauty, a haunted echo of sometime Fresh & Onlys patron Kelley Stoltz. "Take Aim Goliath" is soft-focus garage-psych, guitar and drums ramble slicked over with gauzy indeterminacy.

The album comes with a download code that yields five additional tracks, none of them throwaways and one, "Emerald Green," among the best of the lot. Still more suggestive than fully-realized, the cut is embellished with gently massed voices and the faraway echo of trumpet, split in two by a wandering guitar solo, and finished by a weirdly paced drum fill. Yet though the pieces may not fit together seamlessly, they do create a bit of a world, brightly colored, imprecisely perceived, full of surprises and altogether fascinating.

Standout Tracks: "Warriors & Clowns", "Amazing Visions", "Emerald Green" JENNIFER KELLY