The Softies: Holiday In Rhode Island

The Sacramento indie-pop band Tiger Trap never found the audience or credit it deserved, breaking up in 1994 after only one brightly engaging full-length album and an EP. But singer-guitarist Rose Melberg has been prolific ever since, recording solo and with Go Sailor and Gaze when she's not singing in the unfailingly pleasant duo The Softies with Jennifer Sbragia. The duo's third album, Holiday In Rhode Island, is one of the year's most gently charming records, a soft, feather-light exercise in rich harmonies, clean guitar tones, and sparkling melancholia. Lyrically, it doesn't run all that much deeper than "Sturdies Bay"—in which every word is "da"—and its mood rarely shifts from a bittersweet sort of winsome resignation. But when an album rarely strays from the tone set by a song as gorgeous as "Sleep Away Your Troubles," who's complaining Melberg and Sbragia were born to sing together, their elemental instrumentation never gets in the way, and, with the exception of one puzzling wrong note (the uncharacteristically off-key "If You Stayed"), Holiday In Rhode Island is just about perfect on its own pretty, dreamy, modest terms.