Dr. Tom’s Leather - Everything We Make

In the same vein as Brendan Benson in terms of cheeriness, the delightfully cheeky Dr. Tom’s Leather were a welcome surprise to my CD player. The guys sound young, eager, and happy to be making music, and their music is pretty good… Oh, and bonus points to lead singer Zac DeCamp for sounding like Stephen Malkmus. In that same tangent, Dr. Tom’s Leather sounds like a less disjointed Pavement, like early Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain era. Everything We Make is a youthful record, and its musicianship is wonderfully groovy. But don’t let the Pavement reference tell you too much, because these guys aren’t quite as brainy as Pavement. But that’s not a bad thing. Dr. Tom’s Leather has majorly gentle songs (“Well Worth the Wait,” “Don’t Despair,” and especially the heart-tearing “Best/Worst”) usually coupled with more sweetly zany songs (“Stuck,” “Blonde Girls,” and “Reefer”). I found that I had more of a favorable bias towards the funnier songs (“This is the globular cerebral bipolar fanatic/ Marginal propensity is average and unit elastic” from “Beyond Illogical”), like the blithely twerpy “Reefer,” where “And I know that I prefer the reefer all the time/ But that’s alright yeah, well that’s just fine” seems simultaneously honest and sad. One of my favorite tracks on the album, the sentimental and Ben Folds-esque dirge “Journey to Oz,” which glimmers with stuttered drum rolls, thoughtful piano, and melodious lyrics, like the coming of age verse “Never seen the sunrise in Ontario/ Never felt this lonely before/ There are some things I life I just don’t want to know/ But sometimes, yes sometimes/ You just have to open the door.” The self-realization aspects of this record, along with the homey, ukelele-sprinkled sound, make it sound fresh and young but also meaningful and charming. It’s an excellent album for those of us 20-somethings who need some light and meaningful mixed together. I can’t personally find anything wrong with this record, but I will tell you that it started to run together after a few listens, as the songs sound similar. And that made me dislike Everything We Make for multiple listens, which accounts for the mark-off on the manstyle points. [www.drtomsleather.net]