Best Local Act
Best Local Female Vocalist
Best Local Album
Best Local Song

Letters to Cleo, Kay Hanley, Go!, "Anchor"

Joy toys Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear. Way back to, say, 1994, when grunge ruled, the Rat seemed a permanent cornerstone of Boston's rock landscape, and storming the nation's airwaves was a horde of Hub-based acts fronted by singers with little-girl voices and backed by big guitars and thumping drums. Today, it seems the last of those bands still standing is Letters to Cleo, and for their perseverance alone, they might have deserved to be named Best Local Act. But the veteran band, who parted ways with their label, Revolution, last month, have also proved themselves time and again to be among Boston's best musicians, live and on CD. Kay Hanley, who is named Best Local Female Vocalist in this year's poll, always gets her props, but she has the invaluable collaboration of a crack ensemble -- Michael Eisenstein and Greg McKenna's furious guitars, Scott Riebling's dexterous bass grooves, and drummer Tom Polce's thundering stomp.

For that, the Cleos were rewarded this year by winning the Best Local Album category for their third full-length effort, Go! . A high-octane, candy-apple-red speedster of a CD, Go! is an encyclopedia of playfulness, full of snarling wit and delightful retro-Velveeta touches, from '80s-style synth arpeggios to lava lamp-era Farfisa organ and mellotron to producer Peter Collins's Phil Spector-ish wall of sound on the album's lovely centerpiece, "Co-Pilot." And there are countless bold, ear-grabbing noise-pop hooks that, in an era of musical listlessness and uncertainty, sound like heroic gestures. Among the year's releases, Go! stands out as one that believes in the power of pop to matter in your life.

Distilling the band's appeal into three minutes and 25 seconds is "Anchor," voted this year's Best Local Song. It's a nice little poison pill disguised as candy, featuring those aforementioned chirping synths (courtesy of ex-Car Greg Hawkes), a dash of lethal lyrical disdain delivered by a sweetly smiling Hanley ("Only God can help the one/Who put the magnets in your head"), an unironic bridge of "doo-doo-doo" vocal harmonies, and the band's trademark explosive shifts in tempo and dynamics. Of course, even with a lyric sheet, this terse ditty is no less inscrutable than the machine-gun verbosity of past hits like "Here & Now," but whatever Hanley may be singing about, she sure means it.

The earnest, laserlike clarity of Hanley's voice has always made her the Cleos' most prominent weapon, as well as a perennial Boston favorite. Once saddled with a mild case of high-school-poetess gloom, Hanley has discovered in recent years a sexier, more mischievous side, singing like a girl who has a funny, dirty secret. (This year, she even abandoned her traditional waif-wear and started dressing the part of the rock glamour girl. Watch out, Courtney.) Her singing on Go! is colorful, brassy, tender, seductive, insinuating. She and the band have rediscovered a rare quantity in today's popscape: pure joy.

-- Gary Susman