The focal point of the songs on Yellow Ostrich's magnificent debut The Mistress is Alex Schaaf's tender, pleading voice. It's a reedy, childlike instrument, similar in timbre and range to Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum or Nils Edenloff from Rural Alberta Advantage. It's looped and layered, stretched, manipulated; it's stacked and used as an instrument to flesh out the empty spaces in his bare, searching songs. Aside from a pulsing bass guitar, it's the only sound on "Hold On," a kaleidoscope of "ohs" spiraling around Schaaf's heartbroken opening: "Now that we've started, it's sad to see it end."

The upside of such deliberate minimalism is that it creates a sense of intimacy. You hear the songs the way Schaaf first heard them: as bare, hummed melodies floating around in the subconscious, with only a few instrumental hash marks holding them together — a splotch of guitar here, a thunk of piano there. Like Bon Iver, with whom he shares a Wisconsin homeland, Schaaf is a secretary of the interior. He's sitting alone with his beloved in "I'll Run," watching cars, then contemplating a slow walk to the churchyard; his voice clangs across "Libraries" like a church bell pealing in a small… read more »