It's New to Me: L'Avventura by Dean & Britta (2003)

Poster illustration for Geo. W. Lederer's Belle of New York, c. 1900

He was never one to rush things, but I get the impression that former Luna frontman Dean Wareham has really been taking it easy since he dissolved the group. He's put out two albums with sweetheart/collaborator/former-voice-of-Jem Britta Phillips, but even these releases have been pretty casual affairs. 2003's L'Avventura seemed pretty inessential to me when it came out, but I acquired it recently and - surprise! - it's as inessential as I'd presupposed.

On L'Avventura, Wareham's strengths as a songwriter and interpreter are on display, and he also shows a willingness to share the spotlight that he has not been really well known for in his career. But it just doesn't come together very well. The three songs Wareham wrote for L'Avventura are all quite good, particularly the saucy "Night Nurse", a call-and-response duet with Phillips. His covers are sometimes questionable choices (latter-era Madonna?), but most of them are quite good, including a Yo-La-Tengo-style drone version of the Doors' "Indian Summer" and an appropriately spacey take on Buffy St. Marie's "Moonshot". Only a carbon-copy version of the Silver Jews' "Random Rules" sticks out as pointless, and that's because Wareham and the Jews' Dave Berman have too much overlap in their "skill sets" for the song to benefit from a reinterpretation. Phillips contributes two solid compositions of her own, although they suffer from boring arrangements that I think are intended to showcase her voice. And her voice isn't that interesting, as nice as it is. Also, because I got the 2008 reissue version of the album, I've got three unnecessary remixes by Sonic Boom tacked on the end of the album.

L'Avventura is just a hodge-podge, with poor sequencing being a big part of the problem. The best thing that I can say about it is that it reminded me that I need to track down the releases by Opal, the '80s neo-psych duo of David Roback and Kendra Smith. Wareham and Phillips are reasonable latter-day facsimiles of those two, and I really love their version of Opal's "Hear the Wind Blow" on this record. I'm imagining what the original version must sound like and my imagination is making it sound pretty good - too bad the Opal records are long out of print and pretty rare at this point.

"Hear the Wind Blow" by Dean & Britta