Spooky Action At A Distance

This is the second album from Lotus Plaza, the solo nom de plume of Lockett Pundt, better known as the guitarist in Deerhunter. Pundt has penned a number of the best songs on the last two Deerhunter albums, and his first album, The Floodlight Collective, was a tour de force of guitar pop smarts.

He has the uncanny ability to build soaring, melodic gems from simple musical phrases; a Möbius strip of a guitar line and repeating clipped drum roll in "Strangers"; a tribal drum beat holding down the foundation on "Out of Touch"; two acoustic guitar chords and a slight bit of snare as the basis for "Dusty Rhodes"; a series of slowly descending piano chord scales on "Jet Out of the Tundra".

There is a wide variety of songs and moods here, from unabashed rockers such as "White Galactic One" and "Monoliths", acoustic-laced introspection on "Dusty Rhodes" and "Black Buzz", to the lysergic electronics of "Remember Our Days". "Spooky Action at a Distance" is a wide-angle view of what should be the zeitgeist of contemporary guitar pop.