Review

Indie strummer and indie stunner make beautiful music together.
A high-minded few might stand opposed, on principle, to the very idea of Zooey Deschanel, crushee du jour of countless fickle indie boys, torching her way through a stylized set of '70s retro pop. Their loss. Truth is, Deschanel ably channels the brassy cuteness of her acting persona into her singing with a savvy that's always likeable and often sly. And her musical helpmate, M. Ward, shuffles musical clichés of laid-back yore — lagging piano chords, country guitar licks, AM-ready strings — with a dexterity that adds up less to pastiche than to alternative history. Phil Spector should've had a countrypolitan phase, and now, thanks to "Sweet Darlin'," he kinda has.

Deschanel can be a bit more googly-eyed about lyrical clichés — we all know that "self" rhymes with "shelf," and we all know it shouldn't. But her commitment to the material more than compensates, especially when she affects a moderate drawl — on the weathered and worn "Change Is Hard," on the jaunty "Black Hole" and even on her goof on the Beatles' "I Should've Known Better." Sure, she may sing an awful lot about unhappy love. And yet, regardless of what its lyric implies, the title of the opening mood-setter "Sentimental Heart" tells us not so much how she feels about boys, but how she feels about music.