Without intention, my family didn't leave the house all weekend. My wife and I physically left the building to take the dog out for walks, but after a week of looking forward to going out for a movie or dinner, we had little contact with the outside world. It was two days of easy activity -- playing on the bed with our daughter, laying on the floor reading and napping on the couch. I spent late Saturday evening sitting in our living room playing through a short stack of CDs I hadn't had a chance to listen to well. With the volume low enough not to wake anyone, yet loud enough to fill the room around me, I could finally hear a few albums on something other than a boombox at work, and as something other than the background music that played while I made dinner. Loki's album was part of the stack. I've had this disc for a couple of months and I've grown rather fond of it. Finally getting the chance to devote my complete attention to it was wonderful. Like Damon and Naomi's Playback Singers or the Cardinal album, Loki is made for just this sort of living room (or better yet, bedroom) listening party. It plays well enough in mixed company, but solitary listening provides gives you occasion to find all the intimate subtlies and delicate interworkings.

Christian Goodwillie and Jeff Gibbe are the bassist and drummer, respectively, for the live incarnation of Kleenex Girl Wonder. For Loki, both play guitar, keyboard and percussion, with Goodwillie handling all the vocals. Diverging from the rough production and hook-laden pop of their day job, Loki crafts pretty, madrigal-like songs. Pulling together the disparate sounds of Northern Africa and Moorish Spain (the rhythm underlining "Skin Garden" or the guitar winding through "Millenarian Hymn"), medieval folk ballads ("Six Feet of Space") and a modern sense of repetition and tonality, like Stereolab or Adventures in Stereo at their gentlest, the duo's songs are capsules of tenderness and complexity. They manage to avoid any sense of tweeness by keeping the songs short and avoiding excessive prettiness. Goodwillie's voice is a high tenor that finds a nice perch between friendly conversation and choir singer. Wonderful two part harmonies and vocal tapestries, created by multitracking, wrap around the instrumentation, pulling the entire lot out of the speakers and up to the ceiling. Goodwillie could almost perform a cappella, but then this great match of voice to music would be lost.

Goodwillie and Gibbe are deft players with a keen ear for production sound. It's nice to see musical craftsmanship on this level from someone other than Tortoise or Steely Dan. The duo have clearly studied music, and they know what they're doing, but they never let their homework interfere with the pleasure of the music. Songs as structured as these could easily have become dry and still, like many of the songs by the aforementioned bands, but Goodwillie and Gibbe keep this tendency in check. I raise this point only because Loki's songs call out for good musicianship, but at the same time an overly high musical standard could have (over)killed them. In its current form, the music becomes a lovely will-o'-the-wisp in your head -- just out of reach, but all around you.