The Sadies: Favourite Colours

unspectacular, until now: On the new Favourite Colours, the Toronto twang engineers make a remarkable creative leap. On four earlier records, The Sadies dabbled in surf instrumentals, psychedelia, and country-rock, looking to re-create the ghostly, stricken strain that runs through certain American pop, connecting Johnny Cash and The Byrds. The results came off a little mannered, but on Favourite Colours, the band finally exhibits an integrated command of its genre obsessions, playing chilly-but-urgent music with a distinctly Sadies flavor.

When they're not flying through one of the album's many instrumentals, bandleader brothers Dallas and Travis Good mumble in unison below tracks heavy on slide guitar and rapid jangle. The lyrics on songs like "1000 Cities Falling" and "Song Of The Chief Musician" tend to be fragments of stories, borrowing interchangeably from history and myth, just like the early work of fellow countrymen Neil Young and The Band. But though The Sadies' members surely wouldn't mind being mistaken for their influences, Favourite Colours has its own atmosphere. It's a short record of short songs, undemanding and ingratiating.

Favourite Colours closes with "Why Would Anybody Live Here," a collaboration with eccentric British folk-pop singer Robyn Hitchcock, with whom The Sadies' members have performed Syd Barrett covers in the past. Coming at the close of an album filled with songs like the mournful "The Iceberg," the sunny "A Good Flying Day," and the lightly trippy "As Much As Such," Hitchcock's question sounds more rhetorical than accusatory. The Sadies' new record encompasses beauty and sorrow, joy and melancholy, warmth and cold loss. "Why Would Anybody Live Here" Because we already do.