If there’s one band that doesn’t do happy talk, it’s the Happy Talk Band. Luke Allen’s songs deal with loss, but not in a depressing way. He writes with a reporter’s dispassion, collecting details, so his songs feel like short stories and collected on THERE there, they suggest a world where people struggle with connections—making them, losing them, and the aftermath. And just like the band name, the album title has a subtle richness; “There there” is the sort of thing people say to reassure people when there is really nothing to say.

 

Allen’s songs are putatively country songs, at least in the sense that most of them lope to the boom-chicka beat, and they deal with domestic life—albeit, the domesticity of life in a community that drinks the night away, has complicated relationships, and wakes up at noon to do jobs with no clear future. But the songs are also beautiful, unhurried, often quiet pieces with wistful melodies that are subtly supported by malletted drums, Mitch Palmer’s ethereal lap steel and/or Helen Gillet’s cello. Mark Bingham’s production leaves the focus on Allen’s fragile voice, which registers just enough emotion to sound invested in the story. By the end of the album and the haunting “U.S. Out of America” particularly, the cumulative effect makes it sound as if he’s concerned by how minimally the problems around his life touch him. In mp3/download days, any album that comes together as more than a set of songs is a beautiful thing; one that evokes a milieu and makes you care about them the way THERE there does is beautiful in any era.