E-Mail This Article to a Friend Heart matters Mittens and the Vinyl Skyway choose a quiet path BY JONATHAN PERRY

The Boston trio Mittens have a keen eye and ear for pop: playing it, listening to it, debating it, or just goofing on it. A few days before we convene at the Brendan Behan Pub in the band’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, Andy Brooks, one of their two singers/guitarists/bass players, confirms our interview locale via e-mail. When I mention the spot as a fondly remembered watering hole from the time I lived in the neighborhood a few years back, Brooks responds by sending along a verse from "Reminiscing," the 1978 Top 10 hit for erstwhile AM-radio titans the Little River Band: "Friday night it was late/I was walking you home/We got down to the gate/And I was dreaming of the night/Would it turn out right/How to tell you girl/I wanna build my world around you."

Those lines immediately remind me how good that song sounded floating out of the crappy car radio in my parents’ 1977 Plymouth Volare. "I like all that AM-radio sort of stuff," Brooks agrees. "It’s the sound of being five and waiting in the hot car." That kind of universal pop experience of "being five and waiting in the hot car," part gilded parking-lot memory, part synapse-tugging nostalgia, has a lot to do with the endearing appeal of Mittens’ music. The songs on the group’s homonymous debut album sparkle and set the senses freshly alight, but they’re full of familiar echoes, too — Pavement as reimagined by the cuddlier wing of the Elephant 6 collective, perhaps.

The trio’s pared-down approach — the sweet-and-sour vocals of Brooks and the similarly multi-tasking Tom Novotny out in front of their casually criss-crossing guitars and loping bass lines, and Nick Buni’s marvelously economical drums — stands firmly within the long Boston tradition of jangle and melody. Think: Papas Fritas, Star Hustler, Fly Seville, or, closer still, Buttercup, the ’90s pop outfit led by Nick’s older brother, Jim Buni. And yet the sly, self-effacing wordplay, indie-pop bustle, and modest arrangements at the heart of Mittens (on Boston’s Man with a Gun Records) feels as new as dew on dawn grass. Highlights include the bright, Modern-Lovers-meet-Apples-in-Stereo bounce of "Belinda" (which features a tasty turn on trumpet, compliments of the Damn Personals’ Anthony Rossomando), the pure pop sugar high of "Tie Me Over," and the fetchingly skewed "Reinforce Me." The list goes on. "I think it’s not abrasive music, and maybe that sounds a little bit fresh to people," Brooks says. "I think there’s a fair amount of hard rock in Boston, but you don’t really need to wear earplugs at our shows."

"We wanted a clean sound that sounded modern yet classic," says Novotny says over beers at the Behan, a round or two before the trio gleefully go on to poke fun at one another while debating the relative merits of everybody from John Mayer and Train to the Smiths and Steely Dan. "But at a certain point, the album is what it is and you’re proud of it, and because it took a lot of energy and heart, you trust and hope that people will like it and you’ll reach people. We seem to be on the right track."

The threesome stumbled upon a serendipitous path when they decided to form Mittens a couple of years ago. Brooks and Novotny grew up writing songs together in Phoenix, and six years after Brooks moved here in 1993 to attend Boston University, Novotny decided that he too needed a change of scenery. Buni occasionally ran into Brooks through friends, and he’d heard ("I don’t remember how") some of the solo material Brooks had been recording. "I told him that I liked his stuff, and that if he was ever going to start a band, I knew how to play drums," Buni recalls. Brooks grins from across the table: "It was a lot of drunk party talk, like, ‘We should get together and play sometime.’ "

But Brooks took Buni up on his offer and introduced the drummer to Novotny. The three gelled quickly. "I didn’t know them, and we weren’t friends, so there wasn’t the pretense of getting together, hanging out, and having fun even though it was fun," Buni says. "When we weren’t playing music, it was actually a little awkward."

Producer Pete Weiss, who’s worked with the band on both their most recent EP and the full-length, first heard about them from his pal Charlie Chesterman (ex–Scruffy the Cat). "He heard them on a radio show talking about how there wasn’t much melody going on in music," recalls Weiss, who contributed piano to "Belinda" and recorded the band at Zippah Studios in Boston and his home recording studio in Vermont. "They have pretty definite tastes, and they’re on the same page with each other musically. They like simplicity, they like melody, and they’re not big on instrumental solos, although it could be that they just want to get to the point of the song."

Mittens have already begun working on material for their next album with Weiss, whom they describe as "the fourth Mitten," and they hope to have another full-length finished by spring. "We kind of have the philosophy that our time is now," Novotny says. "We feel like we’re going to continue to make good music, so why not push forward? It’s not like we need to take a hiatus."