wonder if Will Johnson has trouble keeping track of his various musical projects. Do you think he walks into the studio, looks at the personnel assembled, scratches his head and wonders if he’s recording a maudlin solo album or the next rocker from Centro-matic? According to the press for the new album from Johnson’s South San Gabriel, his first thoughts as he walked into the studio were concerns about letting the assembled musicians know that the set of songs he would be asking them to bring to life were about a sick cat. Yeah that’s right, a song cycle about a cat. And this from the guy who’s often thought of as the thinking man’s rocker, the intelligent answer to every question about indie rock sincerity, Denton, Texas’s answer to the precocious smugness of Austin or Seattle or Athens.

The songs on The Carlton Chronicles are uniformly excellent. There’s not a single song on the album that doesn’t stand up to the usual high standards we’ve come to expect from Johnson. But therein lies the problem. While there’s not a single bad song on the album, the tone of the whole has something to be desired. It all moves at a languid pace, staking out the alt-country territory that Johnson already mined with this group on >Welcome, Convalescence. Each song is beautiful, played by fine musicians who take Johnson’s songs and imbue each one with perfect moments and stray flights of melody: the steel guitar that moans into “I Feel Too Young Too Die” at the halfway point, the touch of harp and oscillating organ that accent “I Am Six Pounds Of Dynamite,” the light touch of brush on drum that pushes “Predatory King Today” to another place. But through the nine songs that comprise The Carlton Chronicles, its pace becomes its downfall. If the music of this album is intended to convey to the reader a sense of increasingly infirmed feline movement and tendency, then by the time we get to the fifth song on The Carlton Chronicles we’re begging for the musical equivalent of a cat getting stuck in a drainpipe necessitating the entire fire department having to dig the thing out with a backhoe.

Johnson’s voice is a unique tool. He’s able to push into odd corners of the songs, create unexpected harmonies with the instruments, but his is not very good at literal story telling. Johnson’s pitch coupled with a tendency towards muffled phrasing essentially makes his lyrics near indecipherable. It’s frustrating especially when the lyrics must necessarily be key to understanding the song cycle. The song titles give significant clues to the goings on in the songs, but ultimately their content is frustratingly veiled.

The worst thing that can happen to The Carlton Chronicles is for it to be dismissed as simply songs about a dying cat. If it fails, it shouldn’t fail on the merits of the chosen subject matter. As clichéd as it may sound the themes of questioning that are raised here are universal; if sickness is cause to rail against the injustice of something that’s much larger and far less knowable than ourselves than that theme is universal in a cat as well as a human. Johnson is aiming high with The Carlton Chronicles, but it’s not his subject matter that’s his worst enemy—it’s the execution.