West coast duo jerseyturnpike (whose name is all one word in lower case, as their press materials took pains to point out) take their name from their place of high-schoolin'. After several years of sporadic contact and separate musical development, Dina Carpenito and Carlo Dean have come together, 3000 miles away from their motherland, to produce permafrost (also lower case).

All this grammatical hairsplitting might seem more than a little affected. Given the deliberate and crafted nature of jerseyturnpike's music, however, some pretentiousness is to be expected. From the album's minimalist cover art to guest harpist (!) Jessica Schaeffer's chamber-music panache, permafrost is engineered to soothe. Dean is the instrumentalist of the duo, credited with guitar, wine glasses (which actually make quite a few appearances) and snare. The music is tastefully constructed, leaving lots of sonic space for Carpenito's somnolent, flute-like singing; the album alternates between fairly straightforward songs with the vocals up front and wordless, cyclical harp-and-guitar duets in which Dean and Schaeffer get to show off their chops. Intricacy trumps intensity on permafrost, making for a pleasant but rather non-dynamic listening experience, but it's a very good record for the end of a long hard day.