Pitchfork

Your enjoyment of Doveman will greatly depend on whether you can withstand a passionate and sustained conversation with a man talking directly into your ear. The placement of a dry, quietly sung vocal up front in a record's mix is invariably a gamble, or rather a hedge of one: Depending on the listener's mood, it may be read as DIY egalitarianism (reverb is, after all, an intimation of distance) or self-admiration. The Angels of Light records want you to feel the Booker's and bile on Michael Gira's breath; the French school currently embodied by, say, Keren Ann wants you to curl up in bed with every compressed sibilant and saliva snap. Doveman's Thomas Bartlett aims for neither grit nor seduction; he sings politely, quietly, in a halting high voice of a contrite ex-boyfriend mid-plea. A cynical first reaction would be "emo" or "twee" but, as Doveman's often fascinating debut progresses, Bartlett's complete lack of histrionics begins to register. He sounds hurt but never masochistic, dramatic but never vulgar; if this nice boy is this agitated, you begin thinking, something must really worry him. I better listen on.

What you will hear: songs that glisten and sway like underwater plantlife, delivered by a pleasantly bonkers ensemble (the banjo is the featured instrument almost throughout, supported by violin and Thomas's own accomplished piano and organ). The keys handle most of the low end as well; the drums, of course, use every available technique to avoid sounding "rock"-- brushes, muffled toms, weirdly distant cymbals. Live, Doveman's Dougie Bowne (a downtown legend who had drummed for Iggy Pop, among many others) plays a crash cymbal that had unpeeled into a long spiral.

The track names-- "House", "Clouds", "Drinking", "Dancing"-- suggest that the songs may have spent some time untitled; the compositions themselves, however, are elegant, tasteful, top-notch. Aware that they are nearing the border between indie pop and cocktail jazz (a border it might, in fact, behoove the authorities to open), Doveman occasionally retreat into light skronk and dissonance. They can't help it: the skronk sounds decorative, dissonance pretty.

After the first two slow, mood-programming tracks, "Cities" takes the album's by now patented instrumentation and vocals on a swinging walk; the track is still leisurely by all human standards, but in the album's honey-drip universe, it's practically a club banger. The piano solo-- a pile-up of clashing ragtime licks reminiscent to my Russian ears of Sergei Kuryokhin-- is at once the song's apex and a tragicomic respite. The organ-driven "Teacup", which chastens Bowne's drums to approximate a cheap machine's plod and clop, swims with mysterious accents and mini-events, and wouldn't be out of place on a late-period Yo La Tengo LP. The album's undisputable tentpole, as evident from its length and strategic placement (on vinyl it would have been the Majestic Side One Closer) , is "Boy + Angel", which goes enough places to justify its eight minutes and wisely builds upon an urgent tom-tom throb to which one could listen for hours.

The songs' lyrics, which Bartlett appears to holds secondary to the meta-story of his own choked-up delivery, suddenly come into sharper relief toward the end of the album. "Drinking" cuts loose with a direct and rueful chorus about a self-destructive paramour; the closing track spins out a suddenly crisp "The edges hold together/ The center falls flat/ I can't blame it on the weather/ My heart's not an acrobat" as things plink and groan and click and sigh toward oblivion. One wants to build a seedy yet expensive wine lounge somewhere in East Village just to be able to play this album around last call.