Every town or neighbourhood has one of them. A bitter, cranky old man who seems incapable of any cheer, brightness, or happiness. A sore old git who constantly bores people with his tales of woe, anguish, and despair. I suspect that Patrick Porter is just one such individual. In his latest album, "Skylan MO", Porter hits you with a barrage of melancholy and depression, and he just doesn't let up over the whole runtime of the disc.

This could have been a good thing, of course. I mean, most Elliott Smith albums, at their core, are gloomy and depressing, and they're arguably some of the finest music recorded in the past decade. Patrick Porter is not Elliott Smith though, and frankly, it shows. Whereas the latter keeps his songs concise and to the point, even when they stretch out over the five-minute mark and beyond, the former tends to drone on and on, seemingly with no point except articulating how incredibly emotionally tortured he is.

The beginning of the album is weak, with I See You being a particularly bewildering choice to open the album with. Porter repeatedly mumbles the words "happy birthday" over a grinding, unpleasant bed of noise. I Win is a little more interesting, with some ambient samples adding some colour and flavour to what is otherwise quite a dull song.

The title track of the album though, is a slightly different affair. While Porter's voice is still low-key and muffled, he lets it out further on this song, revealing that he's actually not that bad a vocalist when he puts his mind to it. The airy, lo-fi guitar that accompanies him is a welcome relief from the patches of impenetrable sound that characterise earlier songs in the collection. Indeed, an album of songs of this quality and attitude would be, if not amazing, at least a triumph in its own way.

Unfortunately, the success of the title track is not repeated anywhere else on the rest of the album, and the tracks towards the back of the collection are particularly weak, where Porter drags out ideas that were mediocre to start with, far further than they can stretch. What tries to me haunting and ethereal ends up sounding exaggerated and bloated, with absolutely no focus which could have made the songs work.

In summary, the beginning of this album is poor, the ending is weak, but the middle shows quite a bit of promise and has a few nice moments in it. Sadly, it's not enough to save this record from being an unfocused jumble of lo-fi noises, and only home recording enthusiasts and die-hard fans of lo-fi indie will get much out of this.