Holly and Plastic - Life After The Lie:

Tender and angry, lovely and dissonant, frenetic and serene, dense and solitary: Andrew Johnson, frontman for groundbreaking bands H. Chinaski and Happy, has created a solo album that oscillates between extremes yet maintains a coherence and vision. Recorded between August and December 2005, mostly on his trusty Fostex 4-track, 'Life After The Lie' reveals yet another dimension to Johnson's vast sonic reality. Think Nick Drake, think Neutral Milk Hotel, think Elliot Smith.

The album moves through sound, texture, and instrumentation as deftly as it moves through emotion and sentiment, where arrangement and lyric maintain a delicately struck balance, where tonality and language search for equilibrium. And through this pilgrimage toward stability, the album reveals as much about a deeply personal terrain as it does about the larger social, midwestern, and American landscape in a historical present. Most of all, though, the album feels like it is about something, that it is in pursuit of a question, but can only revel in the absence of solution.

This is a rare album that will change you, that will move you in unexpected ways, that will challenge you to be.