Veneer is difficult to place, which makes sense in light of all of the geographical and cultural criss-crossing behind it -- Gonzalez is, after all, a Swedish singer-songwriter with Argentinean parents who plays music informed by British and Brazilian folk-pop. After garnering rave reviews in England for the last two years, Veneer has finally made its way to the US, and the time it has spent bleeding into the international pop music landscape hasn't made it any easier to tell where Gonzalez's musical persona is coming from.

Most of Veneer is just guitar and voice, and since Gonzalez finger-picks an acoustic and delivers concrete narratives and impressions, it's easy to think of it as a straightforward folk recording. The problem with that label is that this music feels confined by the city. Gonzalez's nimble guitar echoes a New York sidewalk's swift, constant forward movement, with the occasional bumping of shoulders, and his stories exist in centers of human activity: "Crosses all over the boulevard / The streets outside your window overflooded." The interplay between his voice and guitar is downright claustrophobic; the two often bleed into a single entity ("Remain" is a prime example), imbuing the album with urban anonymity. These aren't unexplored modes of expression -- they exist in the early recordings of Elliott Smith and Damien Jurado, as well as in folktronic country/city collisions like Hood's Outside Closer and Four Tet's Pause -- but they're rare and scattered enough to resist non-hyphenated genre tags, or even two or three carefully chosen adjectives.

The city also seems to inform Gonzalez's lyrical style. His words claw at the surface of a multifaceted, overwhelmingly dense human landscape; instead of pulling a few representative stories from the mass, he takes broad, impressionistic glances at its moral fiber ("Behind the scenes they grow their schemes") that seem to want to represent a holistic overview. He's also interested in the individual's place in this fabric, but only in a perfunctory way -- his characters are rarely more than a vague "you", and they're always eclipsed by the mass ("Life goes on / You'll see how you fade"). What Gonzalez really gives us is stories of people without stories, which are actually much bleaker than stories with slit wrists, dead parents and cheating lovers, but not in an emotionally rewarding way. In fact, Gonzalez's dreariness stems mostly from his lack of magnetic, well-crafted imagery. You see, feel, and taste nothing in these songs, and even this coldness and sterility doesn't receive conscious artistic treatment; Gonzalez's lyrics feel at best truncated and at worst lazy. They're the words of a troubadour growing faint at the task of faithfully rendering the abundance of human life before him. They don't lack depth, but they lack clarity and expression; the way the musical elements congeal into a single mass underscores this impression. As a result, Veneer earns one of the most tenuous distinctions a pop album can: background music.