I'd like to introduce you to a singer/songwriter who typifies breathy, overly earnest vocals and quietly brooding lyrics. While Die Wandaland's album art appears to espouse irony and fun with its porcelain bath duck motif, we must not be fooled by obfuscate artifice.

What this album really has to offer: extremely repetitive harmonic progressions, many of them involving only two chords per verse, with appliqué melody and rhythm.

Along with musical banality, there is also an overwhelming feeling of general emotional disconnection on Die Wandaland.

While I often enjoy records that leave me feeling upset or melancholy, Die Wandaland has no cathartic release. Instead, it lulls me into an agitated state of inactivity. An example of this effect occurs on the song "Hayseed Highway", which repeats the lyric "there's always maybe," enough times to make me really depressed about not finishing this review before the end of my third listen.

In other words: the music is too sparse and the lyrics too vacuous for this record to really take off. Hopefully Porter, whose promoters enjoy emphasizing his prodigious poetry and novel writing, will choose to focus on those more textual art forms.