To truly be a success as a DIY musician, you must write, sing and play the music, while simultaneously having the ears of a producer and the skill of an audio engineer. The blind spot lies in perspective. Lacking outside input, how do you know if your private creations are genius or excess? On his sophomore record, M Ross Perkins—a precocious follower of Harry Nilsson, Emitt Rhodes, and Lennon-McCartney—very tastefully ornaments his perky poppy confections with a variety of effects and flavors. Near the end of "The New American Laureate" he switches to a harpsichord effect and playful, squiggly electric guitar figures. A slide guitar and a calliope organ effect enhances "This One" whose last verse asks: "Have you ever been to Alabama?/ Well, down in Tuscaloosa/ They've got a ball of fabric softener/ Larger than a B-2 bomber." Perkins' songwriting does bear the signs of someone who's been on a record listening binge. A Byrdsian psychedelia via 12-string guitar underlies the album's most complete tune, "Tired of Me," where Perkins repeatedly overdubs his voice complaining of exhaustion and the way, "This whole world's trying to kill my buzz" but where he eventually finds solace: "Cost two bills, but I got some pills/ To calm me down and keep me still." The Byrds return in "Venti Gasp Inhale" where he both parodies and inhabits such hoary '60s counterculture observations as "I am the stained-glass gardener/ My vegetables are leafy, ripe, and green." In "It's Your Boy" Perkins has also become the latest contemporary artist to write and record a tune that sounds like a Beatles outtake from 1963. A Beatlesque take on psychedelia reappears in "Butterscotch Revue" where he sings of a "Nowhere Land" which is "located south of here and north of my eyelids, yes." But what of those endearing/annoying indulgences that, no matter how disciplined, every one person DIY record seems to have? Other than a fanciful, bleeping keyboard intro to the first track, "Industrial Good Day Mantra," and an extended fade out in album closer "Funeral for a Satellite," all the tracks are crisp, sensibly edited and expertly recorded. E Pluribus M Ross's only flaw is that music can be too bright to be taken seriously; despite lyrics like "And now as I sit here and smile/ It's for visions of violence/ Vicious and silent," ("The New American Laureate") Perkins' emotional involvement in these tracks is kept to a minimum. Fanciful chamber pop bathed in psychedelia, this record, as the title implies, is the work of a prodigy looking in a mirror. © Robert Baird/Qobuz