*** Frogpond

COUNT TO TEN

(TriStar Music)

Formed by four women from Kansas who reportedly moved into a house together a couple of years ago and quickly learned how to play their respective instruments, Frogpond stick to garage-rock basics. Big, beefy guitars, muscular backbeats, and warm, roughed-up vocals are the main ingredients, failing relationships ("Talk to Me"), personal letdowns ("Disappointment to Us All"), and good old anger (in the rather Veruca Salt-sounding "Be") the salient themes. Everclear's Art Alexakis handles the production, emphasizing the same kind of post-Nirvana modern-rock sound his band helped popularize. But there's an unaffected, almost nostalgic charm to Frogpond, which may just be a sad tribute to how rapidly alterna-rock has been sucked into the corporate machine and spit back out as slickly reconstituted novelty pop. Four or five years ago the Nirvana-esque strains of Frogpond's "Nowhere" would have fit right into the emerging underground, somewhere between the sweet churn of the Breeders and the buzz-and-chime of Belly. But today Count to Ten's scruffy melodies and grungy hooks come across as an invigorating blast from the not so distant but much better past.

-- Matt Ashare

(Frogpond join Jennyanykind and Crowsdell at Mama Kin this Friday, January 24.)