In a world riven with psychic rupture and physical dislocation, Griffith James has distilled the chaos. Raised everywhere between Dallas and Seoul, he moved 17 times in his first 18 years under the direction of a sectarian Christian cult that informed every aspect of his family’s life. During his senior year of high school, a rift between the church and his family led him to become a disillusioned teenage runaway on the streets of San Francisco, sleeping in parks until a Buddhist monk offered compassion and shelter. 
 Armed with a clutch of demos, James found himself sifting through the surreal memories and glittering fragments of his previous existence. Amidst the welter of confusion, he found clarity. Comfortably High is a graceful debut of hard-fought realizations, the culmination of a decade’s worth of writing and a dozen lives lived. The sound is somewhere between the beatific and fragile hymns of Elliott Smith crossed with the shaky-handed whimsy of Harry Nilsson. A feeling both hauntingly disorienting and achingly familiar. 
 Produced by Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley of Tennis, this is an album of patience and perspective, the coming-of-age novel as concept opus, a reconciliation of complex issues with rare subtlety and nuance. The result is a startlingly fully-formed first album that took a month to make, but a lifetime to live. It is a form of healing, a ceremony of rituals and bloodletting. Wounds slowly starting to close, at long last. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.