Amy Linton's won great acclaim amongst the underground indie-pop set for being a kind of Phil and Ronnie Spector rolled into one, as both idiosyncratic producer and sweet-voiced singer for her Californian pop combo, the Aislers Set. Heavily inspired by that "wall of sound" production style, Linton ostensibly tries to marry together lo-fidelity's two most endearing contributions to popular music: indie-rock grit and soul-music recording techniques. The result is a postmodernist, mostly melancholy mixture of mod-pop posing, garage-rock twang, riot grrrl fever, and girl-groupish harmonies. But, where the previous two Aislers Set albums have found her building dense song structures of analog organs and reverb-draped guitars, How I Learned to Write Backwards — easily the band's most consistent, tonally tight disc thus far (and, like, surely it should've been spelt Learnt, I reckon) — instead strips some layers away from Linton's lo-fi wall of sound. The set's standout number, "Emotional Levy," is an amazing example of pop song stripped down to its essence, with Linton delivering a forlorn vocal as the set's bare parts — bass-line, handclaps, drums, backing vocals — come and go in a mix that treats silence as a rhythm, too. Another sentiment that prevails on the record is a sort of spaghetti-Westernish vibe, which surfaces intermittently in dangling guitar lines that linger out long into some night sky. "Through the Swells" (previously previewed on the killer Kill Rock Stars compile Fields & Streams) is the best example of this, its soundtrackist intent so explicit it's kinda reminiscent of another crew of San Franciscans, Tarnation.
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