The debut CD of Little Plastic Pilots, brainchild of Los Angeles native and resident Sam Nelson, contains almost everything good about newer ambient electronica. A lot more emotional and introspective than, say, Lemon Jelly or Zero 7, LPP boasts an easygoing yet potent downtempo groove on tracks like the first, "Words and Letters In Color", and the fifth, "A Courtyard Full of Sun". The interspersed, minute-plus vignettes, such as "The Grumpy Chinaman" and "A Sam Is Born" give this disc a Moussorgsky-like "pictures at an exhibition" quality--you can just imagine little, secret stories unfolding.

Thankfully LPP is forward-looking enough in his sound not to revive too many trite 80s-style machine-musik artifacts, a retro mistake too many of his peers make. Nelson is developing a nice technique of rhythmically blending stuttering voice-samples and even some cheesy Speak-and-Spell syllables that occasionally add just the right hint of humor. Any more than that would be too much, but obviously he knows this, and stays on the correct side of clever.

This CD is already going in an utterly fantastic direction, but if the songs were somehow more sonically descriptive than they are, and the tracks a bit longer (or if there were simply more of the longer tracks), it would amount to nothing less than a sunshiny epic for the very near future. Which is when we'll hopefully be hearing from Little Plastic Pilots again.