WYE OAK
If Children

Now that HBO’s The Wire has closed shop, Baltimore has an opening for an over-arching presence on the pop-culture landscape. Luckily, Dan Deacon, Celebration and Beach House are answering the bell for Charm City’s indie scene. With their delicately crafted, curiously engaging debut, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack join the conversation. Mixing sun-blasted shoegaze textures with a sharply drawn, understated core that at times flirts with bucolic folk, Wye Oak brings together such seemingly disparate elements with comforting, Angora-wrapped melodies and an ear for nuance not often heard among its fuzzbox-stomping contemporaries. Witness the cymbal swells circling around harmonica-shaded ballad “Regret,” the slow-burning swoon of “I Don’t Feel Young” or the percolating piano lifting the sweetly innocent “Keeping Company.” If Children strives, often beautifully so, to put everything in its right place. But for all the lovely craft on display, the album’s best moment may also be its least composed: the bouncing, jangling “Warning.” With an irresistible melody carried by Wasner’s breezy voice and a rush of guitar that barely seems able to contain itself, the track reveals Wasner and Stack as more than just studio-savvy; they can reach for the sky as well. [Merge, www.mergerecords.com]

—Chris Barton