Two by twilight

Strand might be called an urban pastoral, and it opens with a weird, off-kilter joke that sets the tone for its conflation of moods. In a heavy, drugged voice, guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Rebecca Gates sings, "Hey baby, you're head's on fire." It's impossible to separate the fatigue in her voice from the relaxation; there's no telling whether she's issuing a warning, hallucinating, or just thinking, "Freaky!"

Strand works as a mood piece, which isn't to say that it's a vague or undisciplined work, or that it's another example of pleasant and unformed indie-pop noodling. What's frustrating about so much indie pop is that there are countless bands who have a real knack for hooks and for the exhilaration of chiming guitars but lack the will or the desire or whatever to give their songs a defining shape. (I can listen to Velvet Crush or Seam, but I'll be damned if I can remember any of the songs when the CDs are over.) The music made by Gates and her fellow Spinane, drummer Scott Plouf (they're a duo), isn't especially complicated. But there's something endlessly evocative about the simple drum rhythms and strummed guitar. Instead of grabbing you with a pleasant sound that goes nowhere, the Spinanes reward you for paying attention.

And they have a gift for what could be called found hooks. In "Azure," Gates sings "Close my eyes to anything but you" as she plays a chord progression that pleases her, and she repeats it and the word "you" two or three times, putting more longing into it with each repetition, as if she'd just stumbled onto it and needed to hear it again right away -- the way you need to hear again, right away, a song that sounds like the best thing in the world when you first hear it. There's a kick to it, the pleasure of discovery, and it suggests why the Spinanes' music (which was just as elusive and not quite as confident on their debut album, Manos) doesn't waft off into the vapors. It offers the constant promise that something is about to be revealed. And though it never is, you don't feel cheated. The Spinanes work not toward revelations but toward the realization of elliptical, shifting moods.

In narrative terms, there's often no way to tell what's happening in any of these songs. The moods range from longing and expectation to exhilaration to languid sensuality to a cutting bluntness. The reason they all come through, the reason Strand remains emotionally clear, is Rebecca Gates. She doesn't have a stunning range, but she makes you feel as if you were being taken into her confidence. Gates possesses the gift some actresses have of tuning in to evanescent wafts of feeling; if she's lyrically oblique, she's always emotionally direct.

She shows just how quickly she can turn moods on the gorgeous "Punch Line Loser." Singing as if she were making a confession over the night's last round of drinks, Gates conflates private cruelties ("I heard I made you crack as I was trying out my wit") with larger, public ones ("They see the world through pipe bombs"). She castigates both, only to come up with a pair of unexpected affirmations: "I watched your back as you were headed towards the bar/There's nothing quite so stunning" and "There's nothing quite so lovely/As a time as weird as ours."

But there's no better example of how unlikely moods link up with one another here than "Watch Down," a luminous song about the middle-of-the-night anxiety of lying in bed and knowing that it's almost over with the person next to you. Throughout the song, Gates lulls you into one mood only to pull the rug out from under you. The opening lines set a tone of feeling protected and safe: "Loving the blue/Of the city sky," only to plunge you into uncertainty with "Keeping it warm/Through long love dying." She pulls a switch again when she follows "the lies in your eyes" with "relief in my head," suddenly turning the imperfections she's facing to a promise of something better, just as the unexpected squeak of her finger making a chord change gives the song's exquisite delicacy a messy, recognizably human touch. For an album that savors its own unpredictable moodiness, Strand is never insular. In "Watch Down," Gates is Sleeping Beauty, but it's not the kiss of a lover that awakens her -- it's the beckoning, unpredictable city right outside her window.