Vanderslice spent 420 hours recording Cellar Door. Which, for those as terrible at math as I am, is seventeen and a half days of studio time poured into these twelve songs (assuming there aren't another twelve sitting on the cutting room floor, of course). Straight off the heels of giving John Darnielle's latest Mountain Goats record a chilling production, Vanderslice returns, along with regular collaborator Scott Solter, to throwing everything possible at his own material. (And, lets be honest, if the kitchen sink were at all musical, it'd be featured on at least six of these songs.) Vanderslice is a pack-rat producer, collecting a favored array of tricks and instruments over the years, congealing into a thick casing that many will be instantly turned off from for any number of reasons. For myself, it's that it can become so large in scope that it turns incommodious, as the denial of space in such a thick production, something that my favorite producers have always had an instinctual grasp of, can be downright uncomfortable. For those able to stomach the production, and it isn't always as obtrusive as might be let on, there is plenty of material here to make this one of his best efforts since The Dream is Over. "Pale Horse" opens the record with distorted acoustic guitar and percussion offering a strong backbone while Vanderslice rhymes off his predictably off-kilter lyrics over layers of strings, horns and a countless number of background noises. "They Won't Let Me Run" is