**1/2 764-Hero

SALT SINKS & SUGAR FLOATS

(Up)

Like Portland's Spinanes, this Seattle-based, boy/girl duo function just fine without a bass player. Guitarist John Atkins writes and sings the songs: simply crafted, introspective outpourings of folk pop that pick at the scabs of wounded romance. And Polly Johnson-Dickinson keeps a spare, steady beat. Their minimal approach works best on shorter, snappier, minute-and-a-half tunes like "Sliding," with its dark guitar shadings and heavy tom-tom fills, and the drumless and unplugged "Dodge." When 764-Hero push beyond the six-minute mark, with "Pitiful Rattle" and "Quadrophenia" -- a clever, blow-by-blow account of one young man's angst-filled walk through suburbia with the Who's Quadrophenia on his Walkman -- they tend to run out of momentum. There are promising hints that Atkins knows how to use dynamics and texture to flesh out his songs, most noticeably in the nice, hooky guitar overdubs and loose vocal harmonies that fill the wistful cracks in "Impossible Waste." He just needs to start spreading that good stuff around a little more vigorously.

-- Matt Ashare

(764-Hero open for Rebecca Gates of the Spinanes this Sunday, November 24, upstairs at the Middle East.)