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Monday, 13 June 2005 17:00

Twenty-year-old Caleb Engstrom's debut full-length, Building Day One, is a perplexingly assured work for such a young artist. Opener "Want," with its childlike xylophone (or is it a toy piano?), finger-picked acoustic guitar, and gentle cymbal crescendos, is a song so infused with knowing and painful backward glances that you can't help but marvel at the singer/songwriter's tender age. After all, this is only a kid, right? An art major, starting his junior year at Illinois' Greenville College this fall. Take a look at the photo on his official bio. Forget Boy Next Door-Engstrom, with his delicate features and all-American blonde, blue-eyed-ness, appears more like the Boy Next Door's little brother.

But brush your reservations aside, because one listen to the Maquoketa, Iowa, native's brilliantly simple, yet often vague and unnerving, first-person narratives reveals a plain-spoken, downbeat sincerity that captures the disillusionment of those confusing years between adolescence and maturity with a painter's eye for broad strokes that, upon closer inspection, mask a deeper texture and countless intricate details. When he haltingly sings, "Now I know that I'll never be young again/But I feel like I'll never be old/So where does that leave me?" the sentiment is heartbreakingly genuine.

While the minor-key xylophone and piano verses of the foreboding "Oh My God" could be the darkest melody Spoon's never recorded, Engstrom makes the sadly uplifting-and startlingly intimate-chorus entirely his own, creating a beautifully unique moment that stays with you. As the song returns to the hauntingly wounded refrain¾"Yeah, we can't see/When looking through this lens/We're blinded"¾the sparse instrumentation and backing vocals become increasingly harsh and distorted, with disturbing results. When the smoke clears, leaving only Engstrom's raw voice singing a madhouse lullaby (possibly backwards), you're left unsettled, and hitting the repeat button in search of any deeper meanings the song might contain. This is powerful, engrossing stuff.

The most startling thing about Building Day One is how Engstrom manages to create such deep emotional landscapes with only a few well-chosen words. Many of the strongest songs here-including the gorgeous, cello-driven "Six," whose enigmatic chorus contains the lyrics that provide the album's title, and the tranquil ballad "OK," with its warm wash of accordion-consist of only a handful of words, written with the directness and familiarity of a love note left on a refrigerator door. Like many young troubadours-think Pete Yorn at his most humorless-Engstrom's low-key, but always intense, heart-on-sleeve delivery infuses simple, well-worn lyrics like "You're the one thing that stays the same/No, I mean you're the one thing that is forever changing" with a profound, tender weariness, giving the words weight they might not otherwise have, and making the simple sound sublime. | Brian McClelland