A Long, Lovely List of Repairs is the 4th album by the 4-piece band named Amelia, which hails from Oregon.  Their forlorn, Fall-like music is a pleasant – and welcome – distraction from much of the over-produced muck that floats past our ears as we turn radio dials, switch TV channels, or otherwise immerse in our iPods.  The music that Amelia creates is sounds of lazy days where melancholia exists as we tremble underneath our various weights of the world.  There may – or there may not be, an answer, but we’re thinking about it.

The music has a Country swirl but is largely folk-like.  In its subject matters, which deals with mournful elements of faith, loss, and other things that we all wrestle with, there is a flame of hope.  All of these pieces of music that make up A Long, Lovely List of Repairs are wonderful.  We can use some of this in our lives.

Delivered by the contemplative voice of Teisha Helgerson, who also plays the drums, and filled in by the multi-instrumentals of Scott Weddle, Jesse Emerson, and Mark Orton (Orton keeps the production spare but sharp), this album is one of the pleasant musical surprises of the year (2008).