Jonathan Bates hates Boston, where he lived while attending Berklee. Yet this EP — his third, but his first for a label — sounds poured from the crucible of the city’s ’90s alternative-rock scene. Its six songs are a canvas of big textures: ringing and roaring guitars, cheesy Casio keyboard tones, growling basses, drum machines, and singing that preens, purrs, and pisses and moans. And Bates’s lyrics drip with self-absorption. His characters zing between puffed-up egotism and deflated insecurity, sometimes, as in "And Repeat," from one line to the next.

If anything guides these numbers, it’s a sense of numb beauty: Bates’s bold layers of sound create an intoxicating sheen. That and the ease with which he negotiates his wide, soaring vocal range — especially its sweet high end — will probably garner Mellowdrone comparisons to Radiohead and Bates to Thom Yorke. But there’s a sense of humor at almost constant play here, not only in the mood-jumping lyrics but in the disc’s sonic twists, and that’s something Radiohead seem to have lost after they stopped writing songs.