Thanks to sustaining crisp production throughout her latest record, Philharmonics, Agnes Obel sounds like a faerie whispering sweet nothings — and occasional sour musings — into your ear. Philharmonics is pleasant enough, but more than that, it’s patient — trumping along in a way that savors its own angelic purity, without all the trappings of naiveté. Here is a soundtrack for waltzing through a field of wild flowers, while somehow managing not to trample upon any of them.

Listen to “Brother Sparrow” – DOWNLOAD MP3

The appreciation or non-appreciation of Obel’s music can be found in the listener’s willingness or unwillingness to savor the small things. In passing, each track may take on the same qualities, and the fast-paced listener-dancer may foolishly overlook the brightly-colored clusters of flowering notes, writing them off as mere clones of one another. After all, what could an album that is almost exclusively centered around vocals and singular piano keys really offer? A bit, it seems, if the mood is right, and ripe. Each singular piano key or variation on Obel’s voice takes on its own unique coloration and sheen on Philharmonics , contributing to a rich, pleasurable creation that sometimes inhabits the world of Elliot Smith and sometimes that of the Virgin Suicides soundtrack.

The meteoric rise of Seattle’s folk pop band The Head And The Heart is truly something legends are made of. The band went from forming at an open mic night in a local bar to garnering praise from NPR and pretty much everyone who has heard of them. Locally in Seattle, the power of the band’s live show has spread to all corners of the city, and The Head And The Heart quickly sell out any and all venues. They were the support for Dr. Dog recently. And to top it all off, local indie super heavyweights Sub Pop took notice and signed the band.

So here it is, the Sub Pop re-release of the band’s debut self-titled album. Tales of bygones being bygones abound. Soft melodies, foot percussion stomps, beautiful harmonies, majestic pianos: it is all here. But, unlike most people in the fair city of Seattle, I’m not about ready to hand the musical key to the city over to The Head And The Heart quite yet. It is true, this is the city’s next big musical export, and there is good reason; “Down In The Valley” is a beautifully crafted pop song, “Cats And Dogs” will have you slamming your head against a wall just to get it out three months after you first listen to it, and “Lost In My Mind” showcases the frighteningly good vocal harmonies the band is capable of.

Listen to “Lost In My Mind” – DOWNLOAD MP3

But at the beginning of all this, I called The Head And The Heart a folk pop band. And I apologize for that. It was unnecessary genre tagging, a habit which I am more often than not guilty of. The Head And The Heart is a pop album — nothing more. Sure, there is soft violin throughout, some great acoustic guitar strumming and melodies galore, but the songs have a predictable ring to them as the album goes on. In the end, this pop sensibility, which makes the band so easy to listen to, also makes the album just kind of mush into one big extended track; in the end, no song really stands out.

To give the band credit, though, The Head And The Heart craft some very nice pop songs. So maybe to truly appreciate the band, you have to deny all the press you read about them, like the last.fm description that describes the band as “like The Avett Brothers with a little extra oomph.” Don’t be fooled by such folk or bluegrass comparisons. Because what makes The Head And The Heart so listenable — their unabashed love for pop structure, pop breakdowns, pop climaxes, pop everything — is exactly what holds the band back. The album takes no risks. But there is a promising sign for The Head And The Heart; it is their debut album, after all, and many worse debut albums have graced the musical world. But for all the hype, I want more of a challenge, because as it stands now, The Head And The Heart have created the most perfect dinner party background album on the planet.

Underneath all the dingy guitars, waves of static, and unavoidable comparisons to ’90s indie rock bands like Sonic Youth and Pavement, the self-titled, debut album from Yuck offers the simple beauty of an even earlier era when rock was made to be overtly fun. The swirling and distorted sounds of opener “Get Away” and the grungier “Rubber” may immediately bring beloved noise rock bands to mind, but the majority of the album’s songs are not as vile as the band’s name suggests. In fact, songs like “The Wall” recall the head-bopping of The Beatles with shameless sunny vibes and youthful exuberance. In similar fashion, “Georgia” is upbeat and contains lovely male and female harmonies. The combination of fuzzy guitars and lighthearted vocals is akin to that of contemporaries like San Francisco’s The Fresh & Onlys.

While it may be easy to focus on Yuck’s noisier tendencies, the rosier songs also beam for attention. The bottom line is that Yuck merely knows how to enjoy the moment. Whether they write a dazed beach tune like “Holing Out” or a heavier instrumental track such as “Rose Gives A Lily,” they give it their all and demonstrate that there can be more than meets the eye.

Doctors In My Bed by Yuck

Listening to Scattered Trees’ latest album, Sympathy, has been a curious experience for me. The same disc, under different settings and different circumstances, has been at times nerve-wracking and at times wonderful.

Just now, I have awoken with the third track from Sympathy echoing in my head, the words, “Everyday, you love, then you leave me/ We’ll be the only ones/ We’ll be the only ones to remember…” playing on repeat. These nostalgic words comprise nearly the lyrical totality of “Love And Leave,” but the simplicity works, its pop mechanics doing their part to captivate, its captivation enough to bound me out of bed to write about it.

Listen to “Four Days Straight” – DOWNLOAD MP3

In theory, the entire Sympathy album works on a “love and leave” level. It is wonderful when I allow myself to take its pop songwriting purity for what it is; it is nerve-wracking when I turn music critic and analyze every implicit action. This album feels wonderful, but in a way that might make one feel guilty — like ’90s alternative rock feels wonderful, but makes one feel guilty. Take some electronic-minded influences and vibes from bands like The Postal Service, and you have a fair summation of Scattered Trees.

That description may sound absolutely horrible on paper, but again, this is the dilemma.

Do we not still enjoy Third Eye Blind and The Postal Service immensely when they emerge ironically from their stale depths? The answer is a resigned, “Godammit, yes, we do!” though we may try to shield our enjoyment beneath an exaggerated facade of acceptance. We’ve been told to be ashamed of these things, by the media and by “maturity,” and so we are… but the songwriting catchiness of these creations is undeniable, even years after the fact, and far beyond irony.

Such, then, is the case with Scattered Trees. I could nitpick about how the chorus of “Four Days Straight” has gang vocals that are poppy to the point of cheesiness, or how the verse from “A Conversation About Death On New Years Eve” may in fact bear similarity to parts of Give Up, but what does it even matter, anyway? Far be it from me to critically trod down an album that has the impetus to lodge itself into my brain with such ferocity.

Sympathy sounds like a self-aware, finely-crafted disc that inherently showcases the band’s collective years of influence. Whether those influences are acceptable or deplorable is up to you, but in my mind, good pop music is often about much more than technical analysis; it’s about the way it makes you feel.

Minneapolis trio, CLAPS, has recently released two EPs back-to-back, on the ever-trustworthy Guilt Ridden Pop! label. For some reason, rising out of all of the forgettable bands in the synthpop genre, CLAPS just sits right with me, their ’80s-inspired vocals and minimal synthpop occasionally reminding me of my favorite childhood videogames. Sure, that description seems fitting for about a million bands in the genre, but there’s a little more to it than that with CLAPS.

Listen to “Fold” – DOWNLOAD MP3

The New Science EP has three tracks: “Fold,” “Gruzzles,” and “Fireworks,” but it is very obvious that “Fold” and its three remixes are the main focus of the EP. In fact, the other two tracks are added bonuses, but they don’t add much. “Fold”‘s excellence can be found in cyptic lyrics, which feel like subconsciously-penned ramblings in incoherence. “The movement/ In three steps/ Fall forward/ Fall inward/ One in itself/ Back into the fold,” takes the track down a path of shapely abstraction, meandering hypnotically while addressing topics of dreams, multiplication, and directional confusion. The three remixes of “Fold” — crafted by Chic Portier, Busy Signals, and Sovietpanda — play up the mathematical dreaminess of the track with fairly minimal electronica, with Chic Portier’s particularly representative of this. “Fold” can easily be listened to time and time again, and keeping the EP exclusively dedicated to “Fold” may have been a good move. But c’est la vie.

The No Party EP follows a similar formula, only it contains one remix for each of its three tracks, “Lost,” “Red Dress,” and “Game Undone.” Of the two EPs, No Party is the stronger one. “Lost” and “Red Dress” tell tales of longing, recalling unfavorable emotions in a rather literal fashion, with subdued synths to match. “Game Undone” is a whirlwinding descent of a song, which feels as though it is coming undone itself, keyboard stroke by dizzying keyboard stroke.

Though I’m not sure why CLAPS chose to release two back-to-back EPs, it was a smart move. Last year, we reviewed an Aluminum Babe release; 17 was a full-length synthpop journey that contained sixteen tracks and featured a scant three remixes. It was easily too long and too burdensome. These two CLAPS EPs feature a more dramatic three remix to three track ratio — but simply breaking up the releases makes this dual EP release feel like a bite-sized introduction to the band.