The Comas - Wave To Make Friends (1999)

New York-based rock band originally formed by Andy Herod and Nicole Gehweiler in 1998 in Chapel Hill, NC.

The Comas play imaginative, hazy alt-pop on their debut. Winsome is an adjective often used to describe this kind of underground rock, sometimes implying a certain amateurishness as well, like when it's applied to recordings on the K label or the Raincoats. Those reference points aren't totally out of the ballpark, but there's a deeper level of accomplishment than there is on most K releases. Whether stressing the vocals or the instrumental passages, there's a lulling buzz to these tunes, with the key ingredients being the earnest male-female vocal harmonies, violin, floating organ, and occasional E-bow guitar and sampling, which are used for intelligent punctuation rather than in-your-face modernism. It's like slowcore music with happier vibes and more melody.