"What is that, my nature?" Chris Cohen asks, simply and sweetly, mid-"Caller No. 99," amidst a sunkissed wash of flanged guitar and rickety drum-machines and dolloped organs and alien-spacecraft steel-pan drums. The question lingers like the guitar licks, answering the question like interpreting a dream.The jam begins with Cohen waking up ("a year too late/just to sit around and wait"), roused from his slumber by the clock radio. There's plentiful imagery from old-school analog radio —not least of all the call-in competition number of the title— which, in turns, goes with the song's gentle evocations of the soft-pop and yacht-rock of AM radio; a fantasy sound from a fantasized "station above the tuning dial."
"Caller No.99" marks the first solo song from the former leader of the Curtains, co-leader of Cryptacize, one-time guitarist in Deerhoof, and sometime drummer in White Magic. It comes from Overgrown Path, his first-ever on-his-lonesome album, which is due out September 25 on Captured Tracks.
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