“Indie rock” tends to conjure up thoughts of recordings that sound intentionally underproduced made by people so suspicious of the music industry and its conventions that they sabotage their best ideas in murk, mumbling and drums that sound like cardboard boxes. Like so many stereotypes, that notion is at least 10 years out of date, and if anything, bands these days suffer from trying to accommodate too many ideas, and Sufjan Stevens, the Decemberists and Arcade Fire clearly have no fear of putting bold artistic visions in the marketplace.

 

Baton Rouge’s the Eames Era aren’t in the league of that lot, but there’s nothing small, hazy or apologetic about their pop. Heroes + Sheroes recalls Blondie primarily in the way both bands’ singers have an animated, plain-spoken quality to their vocals that evokes the great girl groups without sounding too much like any of them. Ashlin Phillips sounds completely human in every song, and the full parade of mixed emotions are evident in the songs, even though she’s the girl who was taught the value of smiling and being charming, no matter how she feels. In “Watson on Your Side,” she knows she’s smarter than the guy, but she’ll play Watson to his Holmes because she thinks he’s cute and she is comfortable with that.

 

That same complicated stance—seem simpler than you are—is evident in the songs, which sound like classic pop from some vague moment in the mid-1960s. Finding similar songs from that time is hard, though, and a closer listen shows how many subtle, cool things are going on under the shiny pop veneer. Choruses, for example, are typically the centerpiece of good pop, so much so that many hits seem to be written around them. They’re also in short supply on Heroes + Sheroes, with few songs returning to the sort of four-line passage you can sing along with and leave a concert humming. Instead, there are smart, catchy sections that emerge unpredictably and give songs lift and life. Sometimes they come from Phillips, sometimes they come from wordless melodies, and often they come from subtle textural moments such as guitarists Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer laying dissonant, scrubbing guitar parts underneath something sweet and cheerful.

 

If anything, Heroes + Sheroes is probably a little overambitious. It takes a while to get its momentum going, even though the first songs on the album are good. There are a series of minute-or-so songs that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but of them, only “Let Me Spin” works as a short, complete thought. Sonically, they break things up, and when “Teenage Meth-head” appears, a break from the sweetness is useful, but more often they sound like the starting place for fully-developed songs or dead-ends for songs that would never get better.

 

Still, a band that errs on the side of ambition and subtle smarts has to be embraced. One of the band’s songs was included the 2005 Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack next to songs by the Postal Service, Ben Lee and Rilo Kiley—proper company for the Eames Era—and it’s hard not to think that if it was a northeastern band, it would be farther along right now. Heroes + Sheroes certainly demonstrates that it should be.