The Eastern Sea, The Eastern Sea

There’s a sweetly pastoral, serene feel to The Eastern Sea’s debut(?) EP that I can’t help but love. The songs all sail along like musical interludes in an intricately-plotted play, probably set in a bedroom somewhere — for some reason, these songs have a dreamlike quality to them, like Peter Pan’s going to swoop in through the window any minute now and whisk everybody off to Never-Never Land. The music’s warm and gentle and gorgeous and lush, all of it, and the band weaves deftly in and out, everybody stepping just where they should at the exact right time. As the EP unfolds, the delicate, wintery-sounding “The Night” and countryish, almost gospel-like “The Menu” roll on, I feel myself being lulled into a kind of stupefied coma of wonder.

I dearly want to compare The Eastern Sea to Bright Eyes and ringmaster Matt Hines to Conor Oberst, and there’s some merit to the comparison, I think — both this EP and Oberst’s best work are bedroom operas of a sort, intricate and beautiful and fragile, both are gentle and melancholy, both weld folk and country with the best, prettiest elements of indie-pop, and both songwriters are geniuses when it comes to making all the pieces fit together perfectly like a well-tuned clock.

The comparison falls apart, though, when you listen to the lyrics and let the sound of Hines’ insistent, earnest voice wash over you. Where Oberst is all about wallowing and self-destructing and pulling apart the works to figure out where the pain comes from, Hines is about, more than anything else, open-mouthed awe. Even when he’s quiet and murky, as on the claustrophobic “The Floor,” with its subtle (and then crashing) guitars and nearly sinister-sounding electronics, there’s an implied promise of the next sunrise and a new chance to start again.

If it weren’t for the music itself, maybe a better comparison would be to Peter Gabriel. No, seriously — “The Snow,” in particular, with its humble, uplifting majesty and faster, more desperate rhythm, makes me think of Gabriel’s best “moody” moments (think “Red Rain,” “Don’t Give Up,” or most of Up). And I mean that comparison as a compliment; the songs on The Eastern Sea are sweeping and grand while staying ground-level, and I swear I can feel my heart turning and climbing into my throat when I listen, the same way it does when I listen to Gabriel.

Finishing out this five-song indie-country-pop operetta of sorts is the longer, sun-is-rising coda of the bunch, “This Is Holborn,” which distinguishes itself not only by breaking from the naming convention (i.e., “The Night,” “The Menu,” “The Floor,” “The Snow”) but also by chugging cheerily, low-key-ly along to the halfway point, after which it explodes into a cascading, joyful, nearly psychedelic raveup. It’s fucking awesome, incorporating a full choir of friends and family to turn the track into a celebration of staring up into the skies and asking what the world’s going to be like once our children inherit the damn thing. The interior of Hines’ head must be one heck of an interesting place.