Nice. In Tall Buildings self-titled debut on Whistler Records is nice. Now, no one wants to be called nice. Your grandma wants you to be nice. Nice guys finish last. Nice is often used to avoid actually telling someone how you feel. But sometimes, as in the case with In Tall Buildings, nice is the highest of high compliments. The world needs nice, and Erik Hall’s (the man behind In Tall Buildings) debut is nice in the nicest way possible. It’s the Tom Hanks of records. It is accessible to everyone: young, old, edgy, button downed, you name it.

It is hard to make this argument without making the record sound middle of the road. The album’s acoustic beauty isn’t as twisted as Bill Callahan’s or Bonnie Prince Billy’s. Its sadness isn’t nearly as heartbreaking as Mark Eitzel’s. It’s not quite folk or alt country. It treads on Lou Barlow singer songwriter territory lightly. The thing is that it’s so well crafted, produced, and written that it doesn’t matter what it isn’t.

What In Tall Buildings is, however, is an album you wish you could, maybe not hug, but put your arm around. Maybe it helps that it’s just one man because it bristles with conviction and purpose. From the Low-like “Suitor” to the repetitive and drum heavy “Good Fences”, the album finds ways to add touches that could easily have been jarring if not for Hall’s steady hand and singular vision.

Opener “Walking Man” starts with a little guitar picking and a shaker and just lightly adds cymbals. It gives way to maybe the best track on the album, “The Way To A Monster’s Lair”, which pulsates along in a sort of unplugged Grandaddy way. It could have been an epic space rock jam in someone else’s hands. That is the what makes this record so damned likable. There’s a push and pull of what it could be and what it is, and it’s consistently better for being that way.

“Alarm Will Sound” is the “rocker” of the album – a kind of somber one placed perfectly as the second to last song. Thirty minutes worth of softness gives way to the album’s only guitar solo, a Neil Young-esque one that, fittingly, is still quite restrained. Closer, “Flemishing” brings things back down to a Red House Painters crawl, and, at nine-plus minutes, slowly guides us to the end.

Oddly enough, and again it’s just another testament to Hall’s talents, this record has been brewing for 4 years while he toured with NOMO and His Name Is Alive. All the while, Hall collected recording equipment, instruments and worked on his songs in his apartment. This easily could have lead to a tragically overstuffed album. This is not the case.

According to the bio on Intallbuildings.com, “Tape delays, spring reverbs, half-broken synthesizers, funky organs, mics, preamps, mixers, and an old Fender Starcaster guitar all found their way into his apartment”, and all are worked seamlessly into the songs. There’s no mad scientist at work here. Only a guy crafting beautiful songs and augmenting them with a feathery touch in an anti-Mark Linkous sort of way.

So, don’t run away from the “nice” moniker. We all have that friend that we genuinely marvel at their niceness instead of snidely thinking they are so god damned nice. In Tall Buildings is that friend. In Tall Buildings doesn’t make us throw up in our mouths a little, but makes us think that maybe we should, and can, be a little better, a little nicer. Maybe a hug really is in order.