Micah Middaugh, the gangly, loose-limbed lead singer and guitarist for Breathe Owl Breathe (onstage, he exudes the demeanor of an enthusiastic, over-grown lab puppy), told us last year when BoB became an eMusic Selects band that he didn't speak a word until he was four years old. As he explained to us, "I kinda felt like everything around me was — I felt like I was taken care of. In those four years, it was a lot of touch and smell and taste — I was just taking it in." Listening to the Ghost Glacier EP, and now this full-length, you get the feeling, maybe, that this gentle sense of well-being and wonder is the secret to — something, anyway, and that this "something" might help explain why his simple, communal folk-pop songs are so disarming. His lyrical world is full of fearsome sabretooth tigers who only wish to attend school; lovelorn, lonely pirates searching despondently for treasure; and overgrown baseball diamonds where divorced fathers play half-hearted catch with their sons — in other words, a world where whimsy and pathos live in the same breath, and neither trip over each other into treacle.

BoB gives each one of these… read more »