During a self-described "sabbatical" from his home environs of Denver, Colorodo, singer/songwriter Patrick Porter (Phineas Gage) found himself in upstate New York down the street from a Salvation Army. Weekly foraging through the pile of illegally dumped "donations" yielded a treasure trove of no longer wanted instruments and upon returning to his apartment, Porter "holed up in a corner" surrounded (perhaps even hemmed in) by these orphans and created his own odes to those who may have been similarly discarded.
The songs on Lisha Kill are hymns to the frail, disenfranchised and downtrodden. Porter's delicate and often deceptively simple arrangements display a great deal of depth and variety. His subjects are disoriented, embattled and embittered by the day to day grind of life in the modern world. Phrases are often obsessively repeated as a mantra in a vain attempt to reach some kind of edification or at least make sense of the chaos (the protagonist in "Good People With Bad Credit" wonders if he is going crazy as more and more noises and instruments bombard his fragile croon). The melodies lie in wait in the back of your mind only to be remembered days later. Lisha Kill is a sleeper of a record that is perhaps not best appreciated head on in one sitting but rather as a slow drip over a period of weeks or even months.
Porter's influences can leap out from his songs. His breathy tenor and simple but catchy melodies evoke the late Elliott Smith in places (most notably in the witty "End Badly" and "Mermaid"). The guitars in "Free Kittens" shimmer in a langourous haze and the softspoken vocals only enhance the similarity to a certain Hoboken-based trio. However, these are reference points to the uninitiated. By the time Lisha Kill has seeped into your mind, the delineation between influences and new creation becomes blurred.
Not everything works with equal power. I find the unison vocal and guitar line on "Hospital" static and awkward, but then again maybe that's the point of its sing-song rhyming. Perhaps its a microcosm of those moments in each of our lives where we wanted to express things differently but found ourselves travelling in a well worn groove.
My favorite moment on the record might be "Slow Torpedo" which begins with a stripped down Detroit soul vibe that yields to plaintive vocals yearning for an escape (even though a slow torpedo almost by definition is doomed to never escape, and that's the brilliance of the title). The interspersed b-movie dialog samples reinforce the theme of failure and the final snippet forces reconsideration of the character's entire motivation and situation (is he in a hospital? is the ultimate escape from reality?). It's a clever moment on a release pieced together from similar moments of recognition each on their own perhaps insignificant, but like Lisha Kill, taken in total they make a quietly insistent case for themselves.
