American Aquarium — Small Town Hymns. Out 5/1, Last Chance Records.

“The song is the story of a broken heart and the story of society’s expectations, built to the tastes of a producer, an engineer, a mixer and a master. And if you’re part of any of those stories – if you KNOW any of those stories – you shouldn’t be touching that album with a ten foot pole. Unless your name’s on the album, in which case you’re told you have to hug the entire bundle of it to your chest, the awkware moments and the good ones and the ones where you’ve maybe broken someone’s heart or you’ve maybe destroyed a friendship by accident or you may have given someone the best piece of advice they’lll ever receive – but all those stories become part of the cd, for you and for a select few others.” — meganwest to me in email, January 2010

My friend Megan is a lot smarter than me; at least, this winter, when I flailed at her about struggling to know if I could objectively — or subjectively — write about albums released by people I love as people, not just people I love as musicians, she was smarter than me. She said the above in response, and it’s all true, and perfect.

I don’t think I can, after all that flailing, and Megan’s smart words are in part why. I’ll never not experience a flip of my heart at that first moment the drums kick in on “Clark Avenue”. This is a record released by human beings I love with all my heart, and I can’t be objective about it because I’m too close, and because I don’t want to put myself in the position of hurting the feelings of people love while I strive for objectivity.

American Aquarium has released 3.5 albums in the last three years, and I’ve been at the Pour House for all three of those parties. I’ve loved some of the tracks they’ve released on those albums and I’ve been indifferent to a handful of them. I wasn’t wild about the production on Dances For The Lonely even as some of the songs on that album are amongst my personal live favorites. I loved the songs, I love the band, I loved the writing, but I thought the heavy production did them a disservice. It didn’t sound like my band, it didn’t sound like my boys. All the dirt was polished off them on that release and that’s just wrong.

But through it all, I loved them as a band without question.

Here’s what I can tell you: I love American Aquarium, whole-heartedly and irrationally, as a band and as individuals and as people. Small Town Hymns sounds a lot more like The Bible And The Bottle and Bones than it sounds like Dances For The Lonely, and I think that’s truer to them and their natural sound than last year’s album was. It’s kind of sad and kind of sparse and Whit’s pedal steel is so gorgeous it makes my heart hurt. “Water in the Well” is one of my favorite songs that BJ’s ever written, and since I’d only had it as a 2008 drunken solo show recording, I’m glad to have it in studio. (“Hurricane” is another one I’ve heard off and on for two years now and that I’m grateful to have recorded, finally.) The piano break in “Rattlesnake” is amazing. It’s a very, very good album, because BJ is a very good song writer and he’s smart enough to surround himself with great musicians.

I just can’t say anything more objective or concrete about it, because I love it too much.

It’s funny to think that I’ve known American Aquarium long enough for them to have gone from having a single album to having four, plus a singularly perfect EP. I’ve gotten to watch them grow up as a band, catching tour dates home in the NC between long stretches on the road. The first night I met them at the 506, BJ and I talked about Counting Crows and the Stones and he told me that he thought My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade sounded like Queen. The playcounts in my iTunes for their stuff are probably not as high as they should be, considering how much I love them, but I’m pretty sure that only Holy Ghost Tent Revival’s first full-length and Panic at the Disco’s Pretty. Odd. come even close to rivaling The Bible And The Bottle for time spent in the CD player of my car.

You can buy it from a variety of digital outlets, I suspect, or in hard copy from Last Chance Records. And if you go out and see them on the road, tell them you know me. Tell them I miss them.