Winterpills, The Light Divides

I know more than a bit premature, but with The Light Divides it sure feels like Winterpills have crafted one of the best damn albums of 2007. Don’t let the whole “loved by NPR” hype color your judgment; this disc can’t be pigeonholed into that inoffensive-folk/country box most NPR faves (that I’ve heard, anyway) seem to fall into. The smart, melancholy people behind Winterpills (singer/guitarist Philip Price, singer Flora Reed, electric guitarist Dennis Crommett, and drummer Dave Hower) have taken what started out as a soft, wintry afternoon talking about music, love, loss, and all the rest and have transmuted it into a fairly unique modern folk-rock gem, polished to a perfect, crystalline sheen.

Now that I say that, though, it occurs to me the album feels a bit out of time, like a chunk of amazing ’70s AM radio you never heard that dropped through a hole in time to end up here. There are a lot of indie-rock/alt-country touchstones, of course — the quieter bits of The Mendoza Line and Son Volt, the delicate country sensibility of Iron & Wine — but there’s also a warm, earth-toned feel (which is weird, given the album’s overall gray imagery) that brings to mind, well, Fleetwood Mac. I say that not to demean Winterpills, by the way; I’m thinking back to my own faded memories of listening to the band on the radio when I was a kid, and that’s definitely a happy little bit of nostalgia.

One of the best things about this disc is that it’s so completely unassuming, so unpretentious as to be almost shy. The songs come in like slightly embarrassed visitors at a party of close friends; they wave awkwardly, sit down in a corner, and slowly seep into the surroundings. You barely notice when you start nodding your head in time and smiling wistfully. The end result is an album that sounds so warmly familiar, like you’ve heard it and liked it before and are finding it again after a long time away. At the same time, there’s a quiet fragility to the music — some of the songs on The Light Divides seem so fragile and insubstantial that if you breathe on them too hard, they’ll crumble to dust and blow away. There’s an odd, endearing delicacy to it all, especially on tracks like “Hide Me,” which is nicely meandering and plaintive, and “June Eyes,” where the lyrics flit by so swiftly that it takes a minute to realize what’s been said.

Of course, given the above, you’d be justified in wondering how this is any different from all the rest of that laid-back, soft-spoken folk/country that’s floating around out there. And you’d be right, somewhat, if it weren’t for Price’s bitter, bleak, often dark songwriting. On opening track “Lay Your Heartbreak,” for example, the music is slowly-unfolding lite-rock, to be sure, but there’s a hint of bite lurking beneath the gentle guitars. Same goes with “Handkerchiefs,” a beautifully understated folk tune that seems to essentially be about two people who want to be alone but who aren’t supposed to be together; by the end, it sounds like they’re wandering off by themselves into the snow, never to be found.

“Broken Arm” is gentle, too, but below the swooping voices and strummy guitars, there’s a simmering anger, carried across through the insistent chorus. Everywhere you look, the gorgeous melodies and pretty voices — Flora Reed’s is the sweetest female voice I’ve heard since Hem’s Sally Ellyson — serve to camouflage intricate, mysterious story-songs filled with characters who suffer and lose and never do what they know they want to do. There’s enough heartbreak and disappointment here to fill a Red House Painters album.