ARTIST: Brian Michael Roff & The Deer
TITLE: Inventory
LABEL: Keep Recordings
GENRE: Indie
TIME: 39:39 min
SIZE:  54,4 MB
RIP DATE: Aug-24-2005
RELEASE DATE: Jul-19-2005
WEBSITE: n/a

Track List:

01. I Would Work If I Could                    04:24
02. For Pledges                                04:53
03. Winter Will                                03:34
04. This Yellowed Field                        04:47
05. Unfantastic Few                            03:23
06. Drank The Lake                             02:48
07. I Fell At The Opera                        06:49
08. This Thick World                           03:12
09. Pour The Batter                            05:49

Release Notes:

Inventory is all about control - the faster it turns
the better, where levels are set by complex
calculations and the Pareto rule says that 80% of
all music is shit. So what sorts of things go to
make up the bill of materials for this item? A
measure of viola to give a crepuscular drone to
songs like ‘Drank the Lake’, a dusty lived in pop
sensibility, bare bones of banjo with strummed
electric guitar chords, skewed walk through vocals
on ‘I Fell at the Opera’ which develops into the
sort of song that generates power through its
restraint. ‘For Pledges’ has a slinky dusty
syncopation of Josef K where the rhythms have less
spasm and more consideration, ‘Winter Will’ is as
bare as a December deciduous - with bare patches of
guitar with some legato bent notes, it succeeds in
providing the perfect backing for his voice. Nowhere
is there any extraneous sound; drums are sparingly
used, just brushes like gentle urges to keep a
donkey on track, and seldom do the guitar notes run
into each other.  When they do as in the chorus of
‘This Yellowed Yield’ everything suddenly seems so
rich and yet there’s still so little there.  They
marshal the resources for the striding ‘Unfantastic
Few’ - the strings, guitar and drums join together
for a march around the Pintetop 7. Storage location
is key to inventory: you can locate the inventory
somewhere near Willard Grant Experience, the Gourds,
Hayden and maybe Will Johnson. Where you locate
something like ‘Pour the Batter’ is more
problematical - the obtrusiveness of A Witness, an
aesthetic somewhere between lo-fi and FM, a dusty
slack Americana sound. You can realise your
inventory more quickly if your marketing is right,
and in this case the first 1000 copies come in a
letterpress matchbook packaging, hand numbered with
a signed inventory tag - you should get your order
in before the inventory gets too low. There’s some
debate in accounting circles whether inventory is an
asset of a liability; in this case it is definitely
the former.