Except for quasi-title track "The Redwood Lounge", which clocks in at over eleven minutes, listening to The Redwood Lounge & Other Places is sort of like listening to snatches of half-remembered dreams and memories. Songs drift in and out of the picture, briefly piquing interest, then vanishing into the ether once more. Even "The Redwood Lounge" is more of a collection of dreams and memories than a cohesive song.

Obviously, then, your interest in The Redwood Lounge & Other Places will depend primarily on your taste for more experimental music, particularly that which could best be described as "created found sounds". There were hints of such leanings on Denunzio's last album, Umami, but they come into full bloom here. On the downside, this means that there's no overriding theme to the album, save for the fact that it all seems to drift by in a dreamlike haze. If you picked a song at random, you wouldn't get any sense of what the rest of the disc sounds like; Denunzio constantly adds new sounds and instruments to get his desired effect, and no single song truly "characterizes" his creative approach.

That's also what makes The Redwood Lounge & Other Places such an interesting listen. "Crosseye Scramble", "The Big Stinky" and "Stop Mambo" could easily be the score to a smoky film noir, the backdrop to some sinister sleuthing action, while "Le Bar Dix" exists at the point at which dream-pop and Latin music converge. At the electronic end of the spectrum, there's "Babootus", which sounds like Denunzio performed Eastern-sounding music over a Casio keyboard's "jungle" setting. The acoustic-based "Tam Stone Circle" and "The Chestnut Lounge"t sound as if they were recorded on a lonely back porch in the Deep South.

With many artists, this scattershot approach to genre and mood would make for difficult listening. Not so Denunzio. By stripping away all notion of song structure and focusing purely on the organic development of sounds, he has fulfilled the promise of his previous work.