On Elvis Perkins’ first album, Ash Wednesday, he sounded like a mixture of Bob Dylan and Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. I even initially mistook the song “While You Were Sleeping” for a lost Neutral Milk Hotel song, due to Perkins’ uncanny resemblance to Mangum’s nasally voice and the use of an excellent horn section. On this new album,Elvis Perkins In Dearland , he mostly just sounds like himself. Sure, the comparisons to Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Mangum are still valid, but you wouldn’t mistake a song onDearland for an Aero plane Over The Sea B-side. Sophomore slump is a problem that affects lots of musicians, but Perkins seems to have artfully dodged that condition. Instead, he’s managed to pull together an album that takes the best elements of his previous record and incorporates some new stuff as well.

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