I heard this in Sister Ray's quite a while ago and liked it enough to find out what it was, but I must've been feeling poor that day, because instead of buying the cd I made do with committing the band name to memory - which name promptly got filed somewhere right at the back of my mind (still somewhere in my working archive of cultural references, I suppose, but in one of its deeper recesses) and slipped from my awareness. But then a couple of weeks ago I saw the cd in a store (may've been Sister Ray's itself) and remembered the name and the cd cover and brought it home.
Having had the benefit of quite a few listens now, I find it a bit surprising that this caught my attention in the first place. I like it, but it's...not challenging so much, but it does require attention and a bit of work. This Is How It Feels is definitely pop music, but it's fairly abstruse, tangential pop music in which the hooks neither sound particularly familiar nor fall in the expected places - rewarding, but possibly not, I suspect, in proportion to the effort that it requires to absorb.
Lori Carson sings, by the way, which is cool (I know her from the Stealing Beauty soundtrack and one solo album, the latter of which had a similar difficult-to-put-the-finger-on quality, come to think of it).
