Ivan Klipstein
Lifestyle!
Crustacean Records

One of the best things my high school paper ever ran was a cartoon by Ivan Klipstein. That was over seven years ago, and since then, we've only crossed paths a couple of times. But he was still kind enough to mail me his latest CD, Lifestyle!.

It was with a real sense of dread that I put the thing into the player. It's scary to listen to the recorded music of someone you know — what if it's terrible? What it turns out to be the coffeehouse jam-band noodlings of yet another Dave Matthews wannabe?

Thirty seconds into the first track, I was nodding and bobbing my head. The CD's now in my "heavy rotation" bin.

Whew.

While Lifestyle! oscillates between aggressively enthusiastic to poetic and sweet, the ways Klipstein expresses himself are hard to count. He plays the guitar. He sings sweetly behind a curtain of organs and electronic keyboards. He yodels. His sound dances with a Snoopy-like joy in some quasi-real common ground between Beck, Elliott Smith, Phish and Sugar.

He melds electronic and acoustic constantly (and with varying degrees of success), forging a medley of songs with more sharp hooks than a Norweigan fishing fleet. He's at his best on tracks like "Underground Underground," which pairs record-scratched vocal effects with a sweet melodic acoustic guitar that most directly recalls the ballads of the Beatles. The song's sugary haze is perfectly offset by Klipstein's use of beatboxing and a short-lived tornado of distortion. The damn thing is great.

Its eclectic construction recalls the similarly strong impact of "Amazing Grace," a track dominated by skillful toasting that scampers under a sonic dome of Stevie-Wonder-style Casio effects.

Other tracks, however, get pulled into a folksy acoustic reverie, which isn't bad — except that it's indistinguishable from 1,000 other American singer/songwriters.

Lifestyle! isn't perfectly polished. But it's rich with the promise of a serious musician on the way to hacking out a unique style of expression. If Klipstein can zero in on the sweet spot of his sprawling, tangled repetiore of instruments and influences, he'll build a brilliant career.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)