Mike Adams at His Honest Weight - Casino Drone (2016)

On Casino Drone, his third solo album, Mike Adams at His Honest Weight emerges as both a Hoosier power-pop auteur and a poet of the Indiana everyday. He crafts supremely catchy melodies and fashions ingenious arrangements that thrum with synthpop sparkle, shoegaze drone, classic rock fervor, and sonic textures that draw from easy listening as well as avant garde experiments. And it's all in service to sharply intelligent songs balancing whimsy and melancholy, exuberance and doubt. Adams recorded these eleven songs himself, recording almost all the instruments in his Bloomington living room. Music is a dominant theme on the album, but Adams has subsumed his influences into a sound that is more idiosyncratic, more ambitious, more personal - in short, more Mike Adams. The long ambient opening passage of "Ideas Man," the weightless drift of "Stainless Still," the tangle of guitar notes anchoring "On the Fumes" - these aren't nods to his pop heroes, but the musical signatures of a confident artist who has come into his own. "This record feels bigger," he says, "but there's actually much less going on. Everything is simplified. Everything is sharpened. I wanted these songs to stand up without any tricks."