Cars & Trains’ Rusty String Deluxe pulls together all the material from 2007’s Rusty String, plus the four songs from the Little Song EP—plus remixes of songs from one or the other by guest artists.  Dedicated listeners who already have the two earlier records will want to round out their Cars & Trains catalog, while first-time listeners will know a bargain when they see one. (You can think of the dull remixes as loose change in the collection’s figurative tip jar.  Thanks, sort of.)

That seems to be the idea behind Deluxe, anyway, and for the sake of Tom Filepp, the multi-instrumentalist-singer-programmer behind Cars & Trains, I hope it moves units, although I’m sure that the bundling of two olds to make a new was unnecessary, and that the product is less coherent than the constituent parts.  Clocking twenty-one tracks at an hour and a half, Deluxe is all but indigestible in a single session.  The album doesn’t matter anymore, they say; now I suppose the big retrospective doesn’t, either.  It’s never too early for retrospection.

Enough about that, however.  P!nk, Britney Spears, and Kelly Clarkson have cashed in “deluxe” albums, so let’s not pick on Cars & Trains.  Let’s talk about the music, which is every bit as fascinating today as it was last year.  Filepp sets himself the task of making all of the sounds—with whatever is available, whatever he can play.  Filepp learned guitar first, and then, starting small, he mastered the glockenspiel.  (He appears to have taken no small amount of pride in this.  Glockenspiel is just everywhere.  Don’t listen to Cars & Trains when you’ve got something in the microwave; you’ll drive yourself nuts.)  He plays banjo. He even plays horns.  He sings in a voice that sounds honest and exhausted.  The drum programming is reminiscent of the skittering beats of Björk’s Vespertine: quietly popping like a dying fire, somehow halfway detached from the rest of the music—hip-hop rhythm as it might spontaneously appear in intergalactic radio static.

Filepp is that rare and adventurous sort of musician who discovers new territory for instruments not despite but even within his technical limitations, as Bob Dylan did with his poor overworked harmonicas.  Check out the instrumental break in “Fake Plastic Guns,” when the guitar loses its voice and can only squeak while the rest of the string section falls off the beat and stabs away blindly.  This is one of four or five songs on Rusty String—“And All of Us, As Well…” and “Sometimes Falter, Sometimes Sway” are two others—that are beautiful in ways I can’t very well describe.  If Rusty String Deluxe is a disappointment, that’s because Filepp hasn’t given us a new record in its place.