portastatic: “I Hope Your Heart Is Not Brittle” (Elemental Records)

Portastatic is the work of Mac McCaughan of Superchunk. All the songs are played by the man himself, apart from two numbers ‘Naked Pilsners’ on which Jennifer Walker guests on bass and vocals, and ‘Beer and Chocolate’ which features Kaye Woodward testing out the delicate harmonies of her Adam’s (or should that be Eve’s?) apple whilst unwrapping anything but sugar-coated lyrics like “When all of the nerves/You thought you lost come back/There’s nothing to do about the burning/You just wait for it to pass.”

Given the dietary combination of the song’s title (and if you’ll forgive the terrible pun) it seems possible that the ‘burning’ Mac is talking about is some kind of heartburn. Indeed, as you might expect, the entire fifteen tracks represent a kind of off-hand delving into the deep recesses of that hollow muscular organ which keeps up the circulation of the blood by contracting and dilating and which sometimes, for one good reason or another, skips a jump or two, often on the most inappropriate (not to mention appropriate) occasions.

The feeling that each tune is like a snapshot of a life wherein some negative of wisdom has been left in the darkroom of the psyche and frozen there that little bit too long for its own good also comes across on many of the numbers, especially the punk-trashy ‘Tree Killer’ and one of the louder pieces, ‘Silver Screw’, the lyrics of which sum up neatly the folly of over-romanticising personal memorabilia while the world outside passes you by. However, ‘Polaroid’, with a classic riff that benefits from a kind of double-exposure with The Pixies’ ‘Gigantic’, perfectly encapsulates the theme of Mac’s tender cardiac investigations when he sings “What’s this thing you’ve dragged/From the bottom of the can/With all the plastic bags/Bottles and magazines?/It’s bluish and blurry at the edges.”

On ‘The Main Thing’ McCaughan confesses “I’ve lost all my appetite/Drained my last stores of desire/I have to drink so much gasoline/Before I even catch on fire.” Thankfully, this isn’t the primary mood of I Hope Your Heart Is Not Brittle, even if it does focus on those sparks of indifference that, here and there, call for the injection of an alternative source of energy.

A slice of medium rare, rather than anything finer or more well done, from a man whose ticker is, more or less, in the right place.

• Patrick Brennan