*** Departure Lounge

OUT OF THERE

(Flydaddy)

"No more pressure, no more pain/I want to feel like I'm alive again, older and wiser/Musical for pleasure," sings Tim Keegan in "Music for Pleasure," Out of There's opening number. His sweet resonant voice has an undertow of weary mournfulness, suggesting that music as fun is a concept he's inadvertently lost.

Formed from the loose collective the Homer Lounge, which guitarist and frontman Keegan (Robin Hitchcock's sideman and collaborator and a one-time Blue Aeroplanes member) put together in 1998, Departure Lounge create delicately psychedelic indie pop. Covering Kirsty MacColl's sugar-pop ode "They Don't Know," they slow the pace to a tiptoe and strip the song down to an ethereal wisp. They ditch feyness and polite introspection with a strung-out version of the Homer Lounge clubland single "Disconnected" that's remixed by French DJ Kid Loco; they get more electronically experimental with the tattered and nervy "Starport," which is graced by keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist Chris Anderson's plaintive oboe. Out of There acknowledges life's sadness without losing sight of the hope and the glory.

-- Linda Laban