The Essex Green - Everything is green

The story of Jeffrey Baron and Sasha Bell is a long tale of a remarkable partnership. Not a romantic one – although there was briefly that too – but rather a highly fruitful artistic alliance, born in the remote American provinces in the mid-Nineties and carried forward, with a few lengthy gaps, right up to today through four distinct musical projects (five, if we count the singer's brief solo venture). While the greatest critical acclaim came with the golden three-year run of Ladybug Transistor, straddling the turn of the millennium, at least two of the other bands the couple were integral parts of can hardly be considered secondary: Essex Green, performers of superior calibre and authors of an original blend of chamber-pop and indie-rock, who vanished from the radar at the very peak of their popularity, and the far less well-known Sixth Great Lake, a outfit engaged in a convincing reinvention of the country-folk and Americana idiom in the early 2000s, disbanded after releasing just two albums, both of outstanding quality.

What to Do in Burlington (When You're Young)

Burlington, Vermont, 1991. Despite being the seat of Chittenden County and the state's most populous hub, this small city a few miles from Montreal and the Canadian border doesn't even reach forty thousand inhabitants. It is, however, home to a university, and besides boasting an institution like Phish, it also has a small but lively alternative music scene in which the very young Guppyboy are taking their first steps. The band is made up of singer and guitarist Christopher Ziter, bassist Zachary Ward, multi-instrumentalist Michael Barrett, and above all the talented Jeffrey Baron, who hasn't stopped playing guitar since he was a child. He's the creative engine, and it's him who steers his bandmates toward a reckless alt-rock, somewhat against the grain in the year of the grunge explosion. Within a few months they debut with a brilliant EP on Tup Keewah, Rani, which swings from garage ("Bone") to power-pop ("Chopper") to reverb-drenched Dinosaur Jr-style alternative ("Rahji"), with no apparent direction but with the drive of an enthusiasm not yet filtered through trends or poses. So "Fall" dusts off the energy of late-Eighties British indie-pop, while "Moon" - nomen omen - conjures up the same dazed psychedelic folk that their peers Gorky's Zygotic Mynci are putting out on the other side of the Atlantic, in Wales.

The first two full-length efforts, Aloha and Haci Baba, see the light only on cassette over the span of a couple of years, still for the small Massachusetts label. They're sprawling, rather confused collections, not without interesting ideas, leaning more toward freak-folk or roots rock, albeit filtered through a primitive, particularly naive lo-fi approach. Besides the usual, curious correspondences with the acid folk and deviant psych streak of the then-unknown band led by Euros Childs ("Old Man"), the guys mix Americana, noise ("Black Country Rock") and stumbling slacker songwriting with a certain originality, often in the form of lousy fragments in the vein of the noisiest, most disturbance-prone Sebadoh.

Things start to improve with Juleps, also released in 1994, a far more assured and convincing work in its blend, somewhere in the realm of lovably slapdash and uneven Pavement-esque indie-rock. The electric lesions are less self-indulgent, set within a far livelier picture (though still rather raw and inconsistent) that includes, among other things, garage-punk spit-ups like the single "Shee!", in the vein of the early Lemonheads. Of course, how this lineup will evolve into a couple of outfits of an entirely different caliber and finesse remains, at this point in their career, a genuine mystery. Or maybe not, if you pay close attention to the first seeds of an elegant expressive revolution contained here, starting with the delightful Paisley Underground vignette of "Klub Fub".

In hindsight, what proves crucial is the move to Chicago that the four Guppyboy members make around the middle of the decade, drawn by the low rents and the far more stimulating buzz of the local music scene. Their stay in the Illinois metropolis, however, is quite grim, and although they record obsessively in their spare time, they spend most of their days in restaurants and copy shops, forced to work there just to get by.

Worn out by that pace, by 1996 Chris and his bandmates have already moved back permanently to Burlington, with the sole exception of Jeff, who starts commuting to Brooklyn, where he and his sister Jennifer have begun playing in their friend Gary Olson's Ladybug Transistor. There, our man falls for a touring musician hired for live shows, destined to become a full-time member of that same band. She is the sultry Sasha Bell, a singer, pianist, flautist and guitarist since early childhood. Convinced that she could also make a valuable contribution to Guppyboy, he talks her into joining the band.

In 1997 the quintet releases Jeffersonville, their first and only collection with a genuine album identity. While the melancholy "Affection" seems to be a dry run for Essex Green and Baron's guitar starts to deliver a few gems, the record can rightly be considered a kind of first chapter of the subsequent Sixth Great Lake adventure, with which it shares a search for a new path through certain tenets of the great Yankee tradition. The imprint is predominantly alt-country ("Trouble"), but as always with Ziter and co. the influences blend together without ever revealing clear outlines or definitive directions. Scattered good ideas following a gentle, strongly melodic strain of American folklore, the increased maturity despite the still somewhat unpolished finishing touches, and above all the abandonment of the boisterous streak that had characterized their earlier releases, all make up profitably for the lack of bite, while the jangle-pop of "Avalon Ballroom" and the ballad "Snow Song" are two little gems.

Just as things seem to get interesting, however, the band opts to split up. Although they worked as a formidable launchpad toward a modest but real New York success for Baron and Bell, Guppyboy never met with the fortune they had hoped for, and they close their adventure that same year, with four albums released in little more than five years of existence. They will only resurface on record retrospectively, when in 2015 the small label Hope For The Tape Deck releases The Chicago Tapes, a collection of thirty-two cleaned-up demos and unreleased tracks from sessions recorded on a four-track Tascam cassette recorder over the eighteen months spent in Chicago: a leap back to the fragmentary, naive cut of their earliest work, but also, nonetheless, a snapshot of a band full of ideas (shelved and perhaps revisited later) and a talent not yet properly channeled, a workshop of experiments somewhere between the lo-fi of early Smog and shabby electronics, with "Trials And Tribulations" standing tall as a hidden gem and a very curious "Edimburgh" that, eight years later, would turn into Ladybug's "Gospel".

From Vermont to Elephant 6

Despite their commitments, Jeff and Sasha don't actually cut ties with their former bandmates. Indeed, it's together with them that they move permanently to Brooklyn and put together a new project, originally conceived as a side venture, rounded out by drummer Tim Barnes. This is how Essex Green are born, their name hiding a double tribute not to England but precisely to Vermont, to Ziter's hometown (Essex) and to the Green Mountains.

Their first release is a split single shared with another of their newly formed incarnations, Sixth Great Lake. It's this seven-inch, along with growing appreciation on the East Coast live circuit (in cahoots with Jeff's sister's band Saturnine), that convinces Robert Schneider, frontman of Apples In Stereo, in 1999 to invite them to join the exclusive Elephant 6 collective (effectively granting the same opportunity to their sister band Ladybug Transistor) and to release a self-titled debut EP under that banner.

Essex Green is a small collection that faithfully follows the coordinates of the circle of musicians based in Athens, while at the same time remaining tied to the happy, fairytale-folk outlook of its true source, the band led by Gary Olson which, as mentioned, includes Jeff and Sasha. The bucolic imprint stays tuned to a broad minimalism that, alongside Ziter's lazy singing, features whispers or brief instrumental cameos, and in the only truly traditional-leaning track, "New Orleans", the sound recalls Nashville or (at most the Minneapolis of the Jayhawks) rather than the famous Louisiana city. If Bell only truly takes center stage on "Chester", with a nice flair even though the approach remains impressionistic and devoted to a tepid, cautious lightheartedness, the stylistically most interesting and irregular passage is the closing one, "Bald", undermined by an oblique psych streak and a touch more noise.

Before the year is out, Kindercore releases the first proper Essex Green album, Everything Is Green, recorded at friend Gary Olson's Brooklyn studio, Marlborough Farms.

What's introduced by "Primrose" is an elegant, spare chamber-pop, made of whispers, puffing little organs, fragile architectures and very soft electric etchings. The fact that this sounds almost like a stylized version of Olson's own band doesn't undermine the record's potential in terms of melodic punch, especially on the catchiest, most sugary numbers like "The Playground", entrusted to a purring Bell and marked by a pleasant unevenness, between the pastel tones of the keyboards and the dry interplay built by the acoustic guitars.

If Sasha's flute peeks out on "Mrs. Bean", co-starring alongside Chris's voice in an enjoyable, danceable folk-pop lit up by subtle psychedelic flickers (which reveal, true to form, more than a passing affinity with the Gorky's Zygotic Mynci of the same period), on "Grass" the tones grow more rarefied, in the manner of their contemporaries L'Altra, while the Barrett-era Pink Floyd looms large among the possible reference points. Here and elsewhere, the title itself is evocative: the coordinates are broadly suggested by the song titles, between a nod to the sun and one to the indispensable sixties, whose vintage trappings are plundered with undeniable skill (just listen to the bubblegum of the torrential "Tinker" to believe it). Bucolic references abound, as do nods to flower-power, a few years ahead of the Naturalism of Devendra Banhart and company.

But Essex Green can't be reduced to a simple caricature, a bunch of hippies, not least because the craftsmanship behind their music is far more refined than convenient simplifications might suggest, and this exquisite arrangement work (a godsend, in hindsight, for the psych-pop revival that would unfold fifteen years later) implicitly bears the golden seal of Elephant 6. The band remains likeable even when ("Big Green Tree") they opt for blander, more loping cadences, letting their music be tinged with chicano flavors far more credible than those of plenty of indie-pop acts riding high at the time, Belle & Sebastian chief among them. It's this same expressive vivacity that lends their debut a sinuous charm that never slips into cheap, phony exoticism, and whose natural ease brings them closer, if anything, to the Swedish champions Acid House Kings.

There's nothing shouted or showy here; the band wins you over mainly through its understatement. After a few gems of crystalline ecstasy ("Carballo") – admittedly more conventional in terms of songwriting, by necessity – the album's closing stretch makes room for its most authentically folk strand, the same one that grew out of Guppyboy's quirky roots leanings, and which would be given ample room in the parallel adventure of Sixth Great Lake, the more eclectic side of their many influences, and in some ways the one most at risk of growing tiresome.

This other shared project, meanwhile, arrives at its full-length debut in 2001 with Up The Country, again via Kindercore, self-recorded in Burlington with fellow local Colin Clary as a guest, future frontman of Smittens.

What the quintet offers here is roots rock with sturdy rustic evocations, built on a luminous minimalism and a substantial economy of means (which includes Bell's hammond, dispensed homeopathically), yet still able to come across with a thoroughly heartening spirit and splendid harmonies, without a single superfluous instrument or wasted note. With Sasha at the helm and nimble acoustic phrasing, "Across The Northern Border" brings out the musicians' more markedly folk or alt-country side, which for them is unquestionably the incarnation furthest removed from what they do in Ladybug Transistor. The blueprint remains broadly the same further on, in the name of a melancholy, traditionalist songwriting that is frugal but far from bare, taking Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo as its key reference points, while refusing to indulge in the genre's usual clichés. Given the incredible evocative power that seems to emerge from nothing ("The Ballad Of A Sometimes Traveller"), it doesn't seem excessive to invoke another giant of that same world, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, whose rigor, discipline and clarity of both composition and playing are matched here.

As the record progresses, the traditional strand increasingly takes over, bending toward a rustic, withdrawn authorial voice when Ziter sings, or toward a superb Americana-flavored vignette style when the honors go to his female counterpart; the band indulges in remarkable evocations of the Guthrie-esque imagery of wandering along North America's railroad tracks ("300 Miles"), or gives pride of place to a harmonica in tracks like "Rockin' Chair", as communal and participatory as those of Mark Olson and Victoria Williams' Creekdippers.

There's no shortage of occasional flashes close to slowcore, which help paint this placid, reserved, contemplative album in autumnal tones (never overdone), but the band is also happy to embrace an even starker austerity, as when "Blue" dons a lazy but proud mask à la Howe Gelb. While the fragrant poetics of simplicity are never betrayed, the only slightly sweeter moment on the whole record is "Cannon Beach", where even so the complexion stays pale and the faint colors never quite match the vivid pastels of Belle & Sebastian (evoked at times too, for instance through the horns).

On the launch pad

The excellent work released under the Sixth Great Lake name clearly remains a vacation pastime (and an almost clandestine one) for the musicians, pursued during brief returns to Vermont for some downtime. As for the main project, Essex Green, beyond the regular contributions of longtime friends, as early as the sophomore album the creative and operational core is narrowed down to the trio of Ziter, Baron and Bell.

What's striking about the new The Long Goodbye, released in April 2003, is the greater confidence the three musicians display thanks to an even more sophisticated sound, the ease with which they move almost effortlessly, and an increasingly admirable balance between electric and acoustic textures. It's Bell in particular whose singing has matured enormously, more credible and versatile, less nymph-like. The band's signature chamber-pop sounds fluid and celestial, bolstered by decorations and vocal blends bordering on sunshine pop, but also by a handcrafted quality in its details that owes major debts to Sixties British folk (Fairport Convention above all) as well as to Greenwich Village songwriting (echoes of Fred Neil in "Julia"): a superb mix that avoids the baroque excesses of Ladybug Transistor, impresses with its restraint, and seduces with a sound that, while derivative, is undeniably in step with the times ("The Late Great Cassiopia").

This gives rise to captivating ballads like "Our Lady In Havana", still built along the thread of tradition but particularly airy and moving in how they unfold, just like the band behind The Albemarle Sound – and, if anything, even better (standing tall is the little gem of melancholy intimacy "The Boo Hoo Boy", which flows into the dandy, wistful pop of a Neil Hannon).

The risk of settling into formula is averted thanks to the very framework the trio has chosen to adopt, its refusal of formal tampering or overly marked aestheticization, favoring instead more down-to-earth alternatives, like the elegant, nimble roots sound of "Lazy May" or the polished alt-country of "Southern States", in which they show they've taken the lessons of 10,000 Maniacs to heart. The instrumentation itself at times flaunts a wide-ranging pursuit of Yankee folklore, broadening the stylistic horizons of a band that can no longer be hastily pigeonholed as indie-pop, and which instead leans often and willingly toward folk and Americana, renewing with undeniable pleasure the illusion of being in the presence of an unexpected new Natalie Merchant. In the years of the Nam boom in Europe, Essex Green's response is as elegant as it is decisive, as if to reaffirm that in the great game of pop revivalism, nobody ever really invents anything new.

This record, which is also their debut for the prestigious Merge label, gains decent visibility and more than flattering reviews over the course of the year. International tours follow, with numerous dates especially in Scandinavia, while Sasha already has his solo debut ready, released shortly afterward on Track & Field under the moniker Finishing School.

Produced by Gary Olson and Andy Le Vein, with guest appearances by Jeff and Ladybug drummer San Fadyl, Destination Girl is in some ways a Spector-esque record, full of delightful Sixties arrangements, bright organs, farfisa, and bold orchestrations straddling folk and pop. The result, at least compared to Essex Green, is sumptuous but also more studied and overproduced than it should be. The sounds and arrangements come across as elaborate, overworked; the singer chirps her sugary refrains with obvious ease, but everything sounds too fussy and mannered to deliver real chills.

To be clear, the exquisite attention to detail and craftsman-like precision remain unquestionable qualities, but otherwise the record seems to lack personality, the production feels cold, the delivery overly aestheticized, and the songwriting a touch defused in its evenness, devoid of any particular flights of inspiration. What's missing is the very idea of a "rough draft", even though Sasha's voice remains as caressing and melodious as ever ("New Sensation"). So, despite the impeccable indie-pop packaging, a whiff of formula creeps in that dulls the artist's shine.

2004 brings another sophomore album, this time from Sixth Great Lake. Sunday Bridge is a record that stays true to the collective's expressive traits and, if anything, amplifies their reach toward an impressive rigor and clarity, so much so that it sounds pleasingly radical in its restraint, entirely geared toward a broader breath, toward vast open spaces, toward a cult of landscape and of the widest of wide shots. The pacing has grown even more languid, the tone wavers between the ecstatic and the sorrowful, and in this kind of new American pastoral the group's quiet humanism gets to assert itself, free of exaggeration and of any formal artifice. The stylistic balance of its predecessor is overturned entirely in favor of the alt-country and slowcore components, reaching suggestive peaks like the purple dusk of "The Saint". The melodic nuances and harmonies are elementary but inescapable, on a record steeped in simple, autumnal, everyday enchantments, one that hits its mark above all through its expressive consistency.

Inspiration goes hand in hand with sumptuous craft for a kind of introspective travel diary, and you can sense the pleasure of telling stories and telling on oneself using just the sharp support of six strings and a voice, Chris's, fragile and uncertain almost out of necessity. With Bell and the fairy-tale register entirely off the radar, at times the record breathes the same wonder as the early Red House Painters ("Downies"), or you might stumble upon a slowed-down version of a more lofty, melancholy Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, achieving a sublime emotional payoff ("Seven Stripes"). Ziter thus confirms himself as a songwriter of real class, with a special talent for breathing new life into the classicism of the Yankee song, effectively writing music that already carries within it the illusion of being suspended outside of time. And while "House Song" grows in gravity and gloom, the small gem of "Kentucky" will, by contrast, be the brightest destination of this journey.

One step away from the finish line…

Essex Green return with their third album, Cannibal Sea, in April 2006, by which point Sasha and Jeff had long since left Ladybug Transistor. An even clearer, more powerful sound, overseen by Britt Myers (who had already worked with Mates Of State and Dressy Bessy), gives extra shine to their increasingly candid revival of late-sixties tradition, this time around also including the easygoing echoes of Tim Buckley in the singer-songwriter-style upgrade of "The Pride".

Once again, the result sits somewhere in the realm of an Americana draped in indie-pop ambitions, playing with real flair on the balance between these two broad coordinates. What comes to the fore in the Brooklyn band's by-now-settled vocabulary is a gentle brand of indie-rock, essentially immune to the crowd-pleasing excesses that seem to be in vogue at this particular moment ("Cardinal Points", "Don't Know Why"). Not unlike Viva Voce and other new voices of American alternative music, Essex Green prove they can diversify their sound with a chameleon-like quality that is both graceful and intelligent. At the same time, now that the diaspora is essentially complete, the points of connection with Ladybug Transistor paradoxically seem to have increased: even in its more clouded passages, that typical blend of nostalgia and bloom associated with Gary Olson's outfit never fades. There's no shortage of exquisite, largely roots-leaning moments (the crepuscular lyricism à la Decemberists on "Rabbit", for instance) or piano-driven ones, but for once it's the electric stylings and the sprightly textures woven by the Fender Rhodes ("Uniform") that carve out real space for themselves, helping make this collection of songs genuinely captivating.

No point beating around the bush: Cannibal Sea is the band's most ambitious record, and it makes no secret of it. The songwriting is leaner and sharper than ever before, decoration and arrangements get straight to the point to great effect, and the streamlining of the band's sound on this occasion can by no means be filed under banalization. Even Bell's performance comes across as less airy and idyllic, thanks to a pinch of nastiness, a playful edge reminiscent of Neko Case (with whom she now shares flashes of a sensuality far thornier than her usual register) that frankly sounds unexpected coming from her. What's especially striking is her growth as an all-round vocalist: no longer just a kitten prone to swooning, but a singer of genuinely superior calibre. The whole album benefits as a result, coming across as even more dynamic and luminous, not unlike what happened at the twilight of the collaboration between her mentor, Natalie Merchant, and her 10,000 Maniacs.

The purity of simplicity settles the matter in the crystalline, pastoral-toned farewell of "Slope Song". Perhaps inevitably, this bucolic tone ends up sealing (and, with hindsight, bringing full circle) the American band's experience in this first incarnation. Authoritative voices in a modern context precisely because of their uncommon awareness of their own musical roots, Essex Green had by this point come to represent something of a rare bird in years of widespread dumbing-down for alternative rock, now in the grip of a compulsive urge to cut itself loose from its roots. The album is acclaimed by critics but is destined to prove a flash in the pan. After yet another long promotional run back home and in Europe, everything simply grinds to a halt.

In 2007 Sasha, who had moved to San Francisco with her husband, gives birth to a daughter and becomes a pastry chef. Although she never officially rules out continuing to work with Jeff and Chris, and despite a couple of flights taken to try recording some songs together, the singer's new priorities end up causing the inevitable unraveling of the trio, now stuck in an indefinite limbo. Further events work against them, since Jeff and Chris have meanwhile also started families and launched new business or artistic ventures away from Brooklyn, in Pittsburgh and Burlington respectively, making any prospect of working together again seem terribly complicated on a purely logistical level.

After a couple of years spent in the depths of a crisis, during which she neither played, wrote nor even listened to music, Bell rediscovers her passion by picking up the dulcimer, and, gradually regaining her confidence, starts writing a batch of new songs together with colleagues from the circle around Kelley Stoltz, something of a godfather figure in the city of the Golden Gate. To finish the work and fund recording sessions with producers Jason Quever (Papercuts, Dean & Britta, Port O'Brien) and Matt Pence (Jens Lekman, Jay Farrar), in 2013 she launches a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, but although the target amount is reached right away, dissatisfaction with the technical results will soon lead to the project being scrapped.

The singer later moves with her family to remote Missoula, Montana, where, despite keeping a low profile, she's treated something like a star on the strength of her past. There she accepts an invitation to play keyboards in a local band, The Shiveries, and almost as a lark sets up the Sasha Bell Band together with Bryan Ramirez (Ex-Cocaine), John Fleming (Secret Powers) and Matt Tipton (Best Westerns), all musicians belonging to the local power-pop and psych-folk scene.

Together with a local producer, the quartet starts working on the tapes Bell had previously abandoned, but it's from Vermont that the most significant news for the fate of Essex Green arrives: Jeff's return to Burlington and his reunion with Chris mark a decisive step forward. A handful of local get-togethers with bassist Lowell Thompson and drummer Steve Hadeke, together with the online sharing of the wealth of self-recorded material, should then make it possible, in a reasonably short time, to pull off the small miracle of a new album for the band, a good twelve years on from its predecessor, as well as a new solo effort from a newly rediscovered Sasha, featuring all the strangest and darkest songs she had written during these years of secluded distance. Both releases, announced for 2016, get pushed back repeatedly, but the trio proves it means business with a couple of comeback tours (plus a handful of dates – believe it or not – from a resurrected Guppyboy), starting with that Scandinavian audience that had always worshipped them.

And finally, here it is: keeping the promise of new fruit is Hardly Electronic, recorded across five different studios (mostly around the Bay Area) and released by Merge in June 2018.

The sugary, irresistible "Sloane Ranger" immediately clears up any doubt and underlines just how singular this trio is. The organ suggests a catchy indie-pop melody, but, as ever, the guitars and harmonies almost proudly claim the Americana roots of a band that, even at its lightest, remains damn effective and sure of itself. Even the overpowering echo of Ladybug Transistor from fifteen years earlier on the single "The 710" turns out to be a red herring: as was already the case on the magnificent Cannibal Sea – just released on vinyl for the first time, like the rest of their catalogue – the house chamber-pop style seems geared toward simplifying the formula; the writing gets straight to the point, and even yesterday's elegant ornamentation gives way to a substantial ease, languid when called for but never generic. The imprint then leans toward a mature, driving indie-rock, certainly not as raw as that of the Kills, but not as bloodless as the most ecstatic passages of the past might easily have led us to expect. "Don't Leave It In Our Hands", in particular, reveals a vitality that's ultimately unexpected, an expressionist streak à la Indelicates that we would never have predicted, and which is certainly welcome.

There's more. "Modern Rain", the obligatory Beatles-esque ballad, isn't just expertly written, it also gets all the sounds right, and ends up reviving out of nowhere Essex Green's standing within that microcosm of soft-psychedelic revivalism which, from Jacco Gardner to Balduin, has enjoyed good press in recent times (which perhaps explains the happily vintage look of the cover art). The former Burlington kids, in short, bend their own nature a little, purely for the pleasure of charting new paths, safe in the knowledge that, at worst, there will always be Sasha Bell's seductive voice to ensnare listeners with the magic of a classic madeleine effect. The more introspective episodes within the kitten's register, now based in Montana, only partly ease the tension, though the album clearly benefits from them in terms of variety (standouts include the sweetly hallucinated, Neko Case-like "Slanted By Six", along with the cinematic tone of "In The Key Of Me"): discontinuity is indeed favoured, even within a single song, so as to tempt the listener with unpredictability.

When the introspective task falls to Chris Zither, in "Patsy Desmond" for instance, the pacing stretches out as in the best Guppyboy material, opening up for a matured Essex Green the prospect of a Dean Wareham-style songwriting, probably the most logical of predictions in hindsight, given that sincerity and lightness continue to be the cornerstones of the American trio's music. A band that chooses not to betray its own origins when, in the splendid country detour of "Bye Bye Crow", it brings back into the spotlight one of its most convincing past incarnations, Sixth Great Lake. Within Hardly Electronic, beyond the never-trite reflections on the emotional impoverishment that technology has forced upon us, nostalgia is indeed present but very well concealed, as if unwilling to let it weigh too heavily on the verdict, should the price to pay turn out to be an accusation of shameless sentimentality. God forbid! Even in its more shadowy moments, the band never disowns that pull toward sunniness that defines this comeback through and through.

Once the listening is done, a fair question nags at us: is there really still anyone out there who enjoys listening to this kind of music these days? Sasha, Chris and Jeff seem almost eager to prove just how versatile and talented they've managed to become by the end of their forced exile. Given their obvious position outside of the trendy "it" sounds of the moment, it might all look like wasted effort, but it won't be, if it helps that small band of nostalgics realize once more just how much this band – as delightful and inessential as few others – has been missed over these twelve very long years.

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