Embarrassing Fruits — Frontier Justice. Out 9/21, Trekky Records.

Last fall, I heard Joe and Lee of the Fruits do a cover of Big Star’s “September Gurls”, acoustic and imbued with an obvious deep affection for both the song and the band they were covering. It was at the Trekky Milltown showcase, and I remember yelping in delight, slightly drunkenly, while the rest of the audience listened politely. There’s not a faster way to my heart, though, than a Big Star cover, except for maybe a really, really great cover of a deep cut by the Band, and Joe and Lee won me over completely with that one.

As I listened to Frontier Justice — which, to be honest, I keep trying to call Frontier Ruckus, and that band and this album have little in common but a similar sounding name — I was thrown back to that cover. The Fruits don’t sound like Big Star, obviously not in the fuzzed out guitars or Joe’s sharp-voiced yelp or the hipster-ironic songwriting that Chapel Hill often engenders, because no one will ever again sound like Chilton and Bell, but at the core, I think, the Fruits are more closely aligned with the sweet and earnest jangly guitar pop sensibilities than any other band, at least on my side of the Triangle.

This is the Fruits’ second full-length, following last year’s Community/Exploitation, and it’s more subtly clever, more deeply layered than its predecessors. It gets drone-y faster, and it feels looser, as though there’s more space in the arrangements, than C/E, though it’s equally as well composed and performed. The space adds to the sound that the band has been working on and Joe’s voice fills those spaces in new ways, almost as rhythmic as the bass lines. It’s got the jangly guitars, partially dampened shouty vocals, thumping bass and the drumming is both more obvious and better blended into the sound — obvious without being overwhelming, not at all disappeared into the guitar — than previously. Joe’s songwriting is simultaneously obvious and subtly clever, and the album has a great anthem of disaffection and loneliness in first single “Long Distance Breakup Summer”. The Fruits are one of those Triangle bands that I keep expecting to grab national attention, and they never do, so maybe it will happen with this one.

I think that it’s a much more complex album, thematically and musically, than it appears on first listen. (Can things appear in a listen? I think of that as a sight word. I don’t know. This parenthetical is at least more logical than when I described Augustana as sounding like trees.) I’m looking forward to spending more time with it; the Fruits are not a band I often think of, but I should, because I always enjoy their albums — and I think, in Frontier Justice, they have produced something startling, knotty, and fascinating.

Embarrassing Fruits will celebrate the album release a week from tomorrow, 9/17, at the Duke Coffeehouse in Durham, with Midtown Dickens & Lonnie Walker. 8PM. I’ll be in Tenne-virginia — more on that Monday — but if you’re in the Triangle and you’re looking for some good guitar pop, do it! BYOB, and buy your own album. (It’ll be a gorgeous vinyl-CD-digital download package, like Trekky always does. One of my favorite things about Trekky is their commitment to vinyl.)