After running Sebadoh into the ground in the name of the almighty dollar, Lou Barlow has foundered away the last few years without a musical home. He's played Karaoke with his back catalogue on tour, and even reunited with former bandmate Jason Lowenstein for a brief tour down memory lane. It's ironic that one of the most prolific songwriters of the last decade should be so directionless and inconsistent. Going by his own name for a change, Barlow takes the piss out of a genre he pre-dates and helped invent with Emoh. It's typical fare for Barlow: acoustic, deadpan, embarrassingly sincere, and yet still nostalgically appealing. Nowhere near as affecting as even latter day Sebadoh records like Harmacy, Emoh shows Barlow in a typically maudlin frame of mind, but the starkness of his voice is smoothed over with pointless overdubs. Even the cover of Ratt's "Round and Round" sounds like overkill. Barlow's music works best when he has a tape deck and some sad songs. Forget this studio crap and just push record.