The Ladybug Transistor: The Albemarle Sound

The Ladybug Transistor is from Brooklyn, but you wouldn't know it from the new The Albemarle Sound: It sounds like the work of a band out of some forgotten pocket of music's past. Though conversant with any number of '60s pop styles—second-wave British Invasion, California-based instrumental rock, The Beach Boys, and so on—The Ladybug Transistor never sounds derivative. On his 1994 Magnetic Fields album Charm Of The Highway Strip, Ladybug labelmate Stephin Merritt created a classically styled, distinctively country album that could never be mistaken for an actual product of country's classic era. While not that sort of instantly indisputable classic, The Ladybug Transistor pulls off something of the same trick here; Gary Olson's almost deadpan vocals and the sheer range of the material provide reminders that it's 1999, not 1966. Brief and unrelentingly pleasant, it's easy to overlook The Albemarle Sound's complexity. The band has filled the album with beautifully baroque pop songs that find Jeffrey Baron's delicate guitar lines playing against woodblocks, pizzicato strings, and a subdued horn section on one track ("Oceans In The Hall"), and sounding like a fuzzed-out George Harrison on another (the constantly shifting "Meadowport"). Of course, it doesn't take a scorecard or encyclopedic knowledge of '60s pop to appreciate what's going on in The Albemarle Sound. Rich and instantly accessible, The Ladybug Transistor has created a sound, regardless of source material, that's entirely its own.