Eric Layer was born in San Fran­cisco and has an affin­ity for “The Sum­mer of Love,” which was 1967 for those of you too young to remem­ber. For those of you who don’t give a shit, let me remind you that it was a period of bohemian nir­vana where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters threw cool par­ties with free flow­ing sex and drugs; and bands like the Grate­ful Dead, Jef­fer­son Air­plane and Quick­sil­ver Mes­sen­ger Ser­vice were formed. Though Layer missed that groovy scene, he per­son­ally expe­ri­enced the Seat­tle grunge period while per­form­ing with a “punk rock the­atre troupe” called Piece of Meat The­atre. Fresh from recent tour­ing, Layer has just released his first solo album called fall. With the excep­tion of per­cus­sion, flute and back­ing vocals, he has played all the other instru­ments for this effort, which saves a lot of money and the aggra­va­tion work­ing with musi­cians you may not like.

The title track sounds like what might hap­pen if Simon and Gar­funkel mor­phed with a low-fi indie band. Though the musi­cian­ship on this one ain’t stel­lar, the vocals are good and the song has an earnest ethe­real charm. “Lost Dog” is more tightly played, is spooky cool and serves up gui­tar work rem­i­nis­cent of Jorma Kauko­nen. The sim­ple lyrics are cre­atively phrased and are a metaphor for the loss of free­dom that fol­lows in com­mit­ted rela­tion­ships. “Lovely Day” sounds like Radio­head gar­gling with Rip­ple wine and is pep­pered with slip­pery slide gui­tar. The waltz­ing 6/4 vibe on “Karina” per­fectly matches the drug themed lyrics and sounds like some­thing Arthur Lee and Love might have per­formed in 1969.

Layer does a great job cre­at­ing mod­ern psy­che­delic rock with first rate arrange­ments, good dynam­ics and lyrics that offer inter­est­ing ambi­gu­ity rather being bland after thoughts. With the help of a few friends, he has avoided the trap of sound­ing like a solo artist and suc­ceeded in cre­at­ing the cohe­sion of band that has been play­ing together for sev­eral years. Go to Layer’s MySpace if you would like to sam­ple some of his music or check out his new album at cdbaby.com. For my money, there wasn’t one song on his disc that I didn’t like.