Elvis Perkins in Dearland

Elvis Perkins in Dearland just released its eponymous debut album, but you can think of it as a companion piece to Perkins’s 2007 solo outing, Ash Wednesday. Calling that one a solo album is a bit misleading, anyway. There were certainly some stark arrangements with just Perkins and his acoustic guitar, but more often it incorporated strings, horns, glockenspiel, vibraphone, etc.

Elvis Perkins in Dearland builds on that, as the singer/guitarist’s three touring mates help him heap more textures, more stylistic influences and more instruments on an Americana base. The songs almost never collapse under these arrangements, instead creating an ever-shifting palette for the casual vocals and poetic lyrics.

Voice-wise, Perkins has some of the idiosyncrasies of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum and the timbre of Rufus Wainwright, but with more restraint than either of those singers. He has an easiness about him that brings to mind Leonard Cohen—not overly sentimental, yet not dry, with a slight vibrato around the edges. Nothing is rushed, nothing is forced.

This record, like the last, offers ruminations on grief and death—which, given his background, Perkins could be excused for writing and singing about for the rest of his life. His father was actor Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho, and his mother was photographer Berry Berenson. Anthony Perkins died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, and Berenson was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Leadoff track “Shampoo”—which begins with the chirping of cicadas and crickets, flittering woodwinds and light acoustic strums—seems to use eccentric folk singer John Jacob Niles’s “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” as a reference point, intermingling themes of love and death. “Black is the color of a strangled rainbow, black is the color of my lung/Black is the color of my true love’s arrow, black is the color of a human’s blood,” he sings. The song has some reggae flare, but it’s anchored in Elvis-land with Perkins’s harmonica.

Despite the weighty material, “Shampoo” and other tunes like “I Heard Your Voice in Dresden,” “123 Goodbye” and the horn-heavy “Doomsday” are more sprightly than much of Ash Wednesday. Perkins also takes care to ensure that his lyrics don’t become overbearing. “I don’t let doomsday bother me, do you let it bother you?” he sings, letting us know that death, while devastating, is something he’s been forced to come to grips with.

mp3: Elvis Perkins in Dearland- Shampoo