Nighttime - Keeper Is the Heart (2023)

Since launching a career as a solo artist, former member of A Hawk and a Hacksaw and Beirut Heather Trost has carved out a nice little niche of the psychedelic pop landscape nearly all her own. Fusing space-age bachelor pad music, Twin Peaks-ready ballads, tunefully meandering acid folk, lilting indie pop, and post-Elephant 6 weirdness, both albums before 2022's Desert Flowers are low-key gems that anyone who loves April March or Melody's Echo Chamber or Jacco Gardner would also love. This time out, Trost seems to have perfected her approach -- stripping back some of the cloudy psych, tightening up the songs, focusing the arrangements, and generally coming through with a delightfully sweet and catchy batch of intricately played and recorded songs. It's probably most important that the songs are more immediate and feature sharp hooks and more dramatic emotional payoff, but the sound of the record is what really might sweep listeners away. The layering of vintage organs and Mellotrons is brilliant, the jangling guitars are subtle and effective, and the application of drums, looped or otherwise, is just right; the overall feel is akin to the feeling one might experience while sipping a nice warm beverage on a cool autumn day. Each song is a miniature symphony, a comforting surround-sound psychedelic dream that has Trost's tender vocals cuddled up right in the middle. A track like "The Devil Never Sleeps," with its thundering tom-tom loops, muted fuzz guitars, soaring vocal harmonies, and wandering keyboard melodies, is one example of the care and craft Trost has put into the sound here; it's similar to previous efforts but amped up and filed down to a point at once. The lilting "You Always Gave Me Succor" is another fine example; the bubbly, carnivalesque "The Debutante" is another. The songs that dial down the ambition and aim for a gentle whisper are just as effective. "Blue Fish" balances Trost's fragile vocals against chiming harpsichord and synth-flute accompaniment, and the result is perfect staring wanly at the surface of a lonely pond on a rainy afternoon music. "Your Favorite Color" adds echoing drum machines, whirling organs, and a string section, giving Trost perfect backing to exercise her skills as a melancholy chanteuse. After two albums that danced around excellence, Desert Flowers jumps in headfirst and establishes Trost as one of the names to turn to when in need of gentle and atmospheric psychedelic pop delights.