“PHOX”

Partisan Records

Monica Martin, the lead singer of PHOX, usually sounds so blithe and nonchalant that it takes a while to notice how her songs teeter amid reassurance and anxiety, companionship and betrayal. “You may taste the salt that rolls off my cheekbone,” she sings in “Slow Motion,” “but you don’t know why I cry.”

PHOX was formed by six small-town high school friends from Baraboo, Wisconsin, who started the band while sharing a house in nearby Madison. Martin writes lyrics and melodies; the whole band collaborates on the music, which has the amiable lilt and handmade eccentricity that find a welcome in college towns. There’s a touch of Dave Matthews in the acoustic syncopations of the music, and a larger dollop of Feist, both in Martin’s airy sustained vocals and in meticulous arrangements that can start out sparse but suddenly seem to gather a houseful of musicians.

PHOX and its producer, Brian Joseph (a recording engineer for Bon Iver who worked with the band at Bon Iver’s April Base Studios), make the most of studio flexibility in songs that develop and transform themselves radically as they go. “Shrinking Violet” — a tentative, promising liaison that finds “two shrinking violets at full bloom” — opens with the lightest of drum taps, a repeated guitar note and a plinking banjo. But as the romance solidifies, PHOX becomes a rock band flanked by saxophones and, later, what sounds like a glockenspiel-topped marching band. “Slow Motion” sometimes has a leisurely reggae bass, sometimes a crisp drum-line beat, sometimes a canopy of pretty chamber-pop, sometimes a zany counterpoint of group whistling, yet maintains a nearly miraculous continuity.

All the changes in the music elucidate songs in which love, friendship and family ties are always in flux. In the bouncy, chipper-sounding “Evil,” the singer catches her lover and her best friend in the act of cheating, “telling me that you don’t want to hurt me”; hurt and anger gradually give way to the consolation that “evil will find its own demise.”

She confronts her own temptations in “Noble Heart,” a ballad that moves between quasi-Baroque piano and a big, reverberant girl-group beat; she warns her love that she’s a “low-level poison” susceptible to “this scarlet lust” but vows to stay loyal. The emotions are convoluted, and PHOX finds a winding and ultimately heartening path through them.

— Jon Pareles, The New York Times