Jamie Barnes recorded The Fallen Acrobat in his bedroom over the course of a year. Like all good bedroom music, it's sparsely lush, pretty and personal; Barnes played all the instruments, and his arrangements of acoustic guitar, hand drums, xylophone and various found sounds are well suited to his hushed, sweet vocals. Like really good bedroom music, The Fallen Acrobat hides a flair for storytelling and a sly, rather twisted sense of humor beneath its mild-mannered exterior. On the title track, for example, Barnes compares falling in love to tumbling from a high wire. After he's splattered himself all over the ground, the object of his affections will "Pick my limbs up / And put them in their sockets / Gather all the change up / That emptied from my pockets" before the vultures arrive to do what vultures do best. The "twisted love" theme shows up in various incarnations throughout the record; it's interesting to hear sentiments like "I don't want to be here / I'm bored to tears with this relationship" or "You want to drive a shiv through his head" expressed in the folkish way usually reserved for the kinder, gentler feelings.

Not all the tracks fall into the relationship-song category. "Games We Play on Roadtrips" is a distinctive treatment of the joys of car travel, comparing traffic noises to music ("It's like jazz out on the highway... it's like folk out in the country"); "Peaceful Protest" questions the divinity of religious symbols, asking "Do the pearly gates ever swing outward instead?".

Aside from "Anyway...", a hand-drum-driven Rivulets cover, most everything on The Fallen Acrobat has a similar slow, dreamy feeling. However, the songs are written and instrumented diversely enough to avoid sameyness. Barnes's guitar playing is excellent, and his plinky keyboard and flute lines show a well-developed ear for melody. It's obvious that some thought went into the production of this debut; it sounds better than many studio-recorded records I've heard. Barnes is only 21 years old -- look for even better things from him in the future.