by Ned Raggett
On its initial blush, Joseph Costa's solo debut away from L'Altra, a project unsurprisingly named after himself, is a mélange of a variety of recent strands in everything from singer/songwriter approaches to numerous electronic routes. The gift Costa and his collaborators have is hot-wiring all this into something just familiar enough, but still only a product of this decade first and foremost -- in its use of rhythms as well as following the paths of earlier perfecters of sonic approaches. A song like the opening "As I Go Beneath" seems to skip almost randomly from Portishead to the Tindersticks, from turn of the millennium Timbaland to Beck at his least guitar-focused, and then back again, a dark swirl of a song that's simultaneously a moody … » Read more