Husband and wife duo La Sera return with their fourth album, the smart-assedly titled Music For Listening To Music To.  Tod Wisenbaker has removed the guitar fuzz of previous album Hour of the Dawn and replaced it with pretty, jangly licks straight out of Johnny Marr’s songbook.  In fact, it’s done so perfectly you’ll wonder if it actually IS Johnny Marr.  And if you enjoy this sort of thing, you’ll also wonder is it really good, or is it rip-off?  You’ll also wonder how nobody else has really pulled this off before now.

As for the songs?  The album opens with the surf-guitar stomp High Notes, a pacy, sparse track in the vein of 80s American band X.  It’s something of a red herring with Katy Goodman’s sweet voice struggling to keep up with the instrumentation.  But from A Thousand Ways onwards, the album settles into a mid-eighties louche Smiths-ness much beloved of the album’s producer Ryan Adams.

References abound, the guitar arpeggios on duet One True Love evoke The Queen Is Dead closer Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, while the classic descending melody of Begins to Rain and exquisite jangle of Take My Heart will have you searching that same album for clues.  Not startlingly original, but it’s done VERY tastefully.  I Need An Angel mixes a Meat Is Murder feel with an outlaw-country vibe redolent of Adams’ former band Whiskeytown, before barnstormer Time To Go blows the cobwebs away in time for the dark blues of Shadow of Your Love.

A relatively short album at just over half an hour, at times it can run the risk of collapsing under the weight of its influences (the ironically titled Nineties).  However for the most part it sounds terrific, who can argue with such slavish devotion to rendering one particular sound perfectly? Perhaps imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery.