Getting to know you Subject Bias grow and prosper BY SAM PFEIFLE

The comparisons to Bright Eyes are inevitable. Kevin Ouellette, a solitary songwriter who last year released Average Potential under the name Subject Bias, collects for his second effort a bunch of the best musicians in the town he’s working in and releases a "band" album that not only features his best-ever songwriting, but also some brilliant individual performances from musicians reveling in the structure he set up. Sound familiar? Unlike the two-LPs-at-once Conor Oberst, Portland’s Ouellette has only released a single album, but he’s managed to combine some of the country and rock elements that Oberst featured on his two recent (country=very good; more electric rock=so-so) discs.

For names on his new It Takes One to Know One, Ouellette’s matched Oberst’s Postal Service (etc.) compadres with local luminaries like Headstart!’s Kevin Kennie, Eldemur Krimm’s bassist Jason Marshal, the Awesome’s Katherine Albee, plus singers Dan Blakeslee, Liz Parmalee, and old Crushworthy collaborator Kim Bird.

To top it off, he’s constructed a band to play out that features Portland’s jack-of-all trades Frank Hopkins.

"Frank, I saw him playing an open mic," Ouellette remembers. "I bought his CD, I gave him mine, and we walked away from each other. Then, later, I put up an ad on a little musician board, wrote up an ad for a keyboardist. I didn’t have the guts to ask Frank. I figured he’d tell me he didn’t have time for me, but he actually saw the ad and contacted me." So, all of a sudden, Hopkins is in Subject Bias playing keyboards along with some trumpet, some backing vocals, and there’s talk of having him maybe play some guitar.

"He’s really amazing," Ouellette says of Hopkins, "and we’re going to be having him record our new EP."

That EP will be coming soon and dedicated solely to country tunes like It Takes One’s "Something Borrowed Something Blue," one of the biggest surprises on an album that never chooses the expected path.

"Something Blue" offers up quite the transition, actually, from the tortured shoegazer of "Loss Prevention" right before it. It’s straight-up country in terms of its construction, complete with Hank Decken on dobro and the fiddle playing of Boston’s Nathan Cohen. But then there’s Ouellette’s ironic vocals (sounding quite a bit like Oberst, actually) and peeks behind the studio curtain with an all-stop where he counts out "two, three, four," and later we catch a "one more time" call out, as though Ouellette were a bandleader at a live show. Which was probably the role he was playing in a studio packed with special guests coming in to learn the material and record it all in one fell swoop.

Liz Parmalee helps out here, too, crafting a beautifully complementary harmony to go along with Ouellette’s country chorus of, "You never know, which way it’s gonna go/ Right now everything seems fine (fine, fine)/ You never know which way it’s gonna go/ Or if you’ll need that dress a second time." The whole thing just begs for a bluegrass arrangement.

And it’s arrangements that are Ouellette’s real strong point here. The album’s first song, "Weapons of War," is only about a minute and a half. It opens with some nice minor-key guitar work, fairly traditional on a single instrument, before becoming become paired and layered.

"If sex is a weapon and weapons win wars/ Then can you tell me what we’re fighting for?" sings Ouellette in his strongest singing style, tenor and a bit raspy. Following the remainder of the verse, there’s a background scream of "yeah," and then an organ comes in to support the drums and guitars while the song fills out into an emotional purge and exhausts itself to finish with a fiddle riff. It just goes from point A to point B and leaves the listener desperate for the rest of the disc.

Ouellette says the song was a bit of happy coincidence. They had demoed up 20 songs for future consideration, and "I thought it was the beginning of a song. I think I taught everybody in the studio; we just sort of made it up." Later, "every time I listened to it, it never bothered me how short it was . . . and I finally decided it was one of our strongest songs, so I put it first."

He’s never afraid to experiment. The shot at radio rock and title track, "It Takes One to Know One," hints at the Ramones and makes use of Kevin Kennie’s extensive pop-punk background, letting him fill in with call-and-response backing vocals. But the simplicity of the genre seems to constrain Ouellette and, if it’s possible on such an emotion-laden disc, his heart doesn’t seem in it.

Much better are the very interesting changes in tones and styles featured in "Guilt" and "Loss Prevention." On the former, Subject Bias move from a music box lilting to pounding four/four drums and electric guitars wailing. For the verse Ouellette switches to strum-strum shoegazer then changes delivery again to wonder "How could I have been so shallow?" Finally, he changes his tune, both figuratively and literally, with an upbeat "ditty-bop, a-bop-bop, a-ditty-bop" move into something more like "Greased Lighting" and a final note that "Everything’s gonna to be okay, and . . ." And, well, that’s the end.

It’s these unexpected finishes in unexpected places that’ll keep you on your toes. "Loss Prevention" will have you thinking two songs have been mashed up by a DJ — you can hear Ouellette getting up to walk around in the studio at times. It all makes for an incredibly intimate and engaging album that establishes Subject Bias as one of the most interesting bands on the Portland scene.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com

Subject Bias play the Free Street Taverna, in Portland, on Saturday, April 9 (call (207) 772-5483) and the Gorham Grind, in Gorham, on Friday, April 15 (call (207) 839-3003).