Brian Eno used to make much of the fact that he wasn't a musician, that his technical abilities on any instrument were quite limited. Instead, he made a virtue of his limitations by figuring out what he could do, then writing around those skills. Similarly, Eno's earliest musical experiments were carried out on thrift-shop reel-to-reel recorders that didn't work right: Eno made the machines' various failings, each of which shaped the sound it recorded in different ways, into compositional elements. The rise of bedroom recordists could provide a similar illustration of making-do, or at least, it should do so. Too many people try to record right past the limitations of their equipment and skills and end up producing poorly executed, crappy-sounding versions of the sort of music best done in real recording studios. (Or worse: they go into real recording studios and run their sound through expensive digital filters that make the music sound as if it had been recorded at home on a $20 Radio Shack cassette machine.) Derek Richey, who writes, sings, and plays most of this Brando CD, doesn't make this mistake. He recognizes that if his equipment creates hiss in the vocal track at 1000 kHz, for example, you either make sure another instrument or effect is blanketing that 1000 kHz range, or you make the hiss into part of the music - say, by blatantly cutting in and out of the vocal track so the hiss becomes another instrumental element. He also knows that if you're not able to marshal 128 tracks of power, you'd best not focus your music on huge, orchestral crescendos from one teensy triangle to three dozen each of trombonists and electric guitar players. Instead, you're making chamber music of a sort: small gestures count more, because they're proportionately more of what's there. So Richey and cohorts can build a song so that an unexpected rise in the chord progression two minutes into "Hold Me Mine" has the revelatory effect of a huge riff reverberating in a stadium-sized sound-space. You also need to make the most of tone color, so very few of what we hear on Brando's CD sounds straight out of the box: lots of effects and sound treatments to avoid monotony. Compositionally, Richey seems to be mining the same sturdy American song idiom, but filtered through eccentricities of lyrical viewpoint and sonic irregularity, as Grandaddy and (especially) Sparklehorse. The asymmetrical mix and placement of the melodic lines in "The Lazybeats" remind me of R. Stevie Moore circa Phonography, and the band displays an impressive range of musical styles. "When in Rome" whips up a platform-booted stomp like Bowie's in his Ziggy/Aladdin glam period, while "Overtime" begins with cold, gray, synthetic classical chord-columns that open into a modified fifties-ballad chord progression, rather like the experimental phase of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark on their brittle, melancholy, and sadly overlooked Architecture & Morality and Dazzle Ships. Brando, then, succeeds in making a virtue of its limitations - which suggests that those limitations are external and circumstantial, not musical.

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