Melancholy, as has often been observed, is an almost ubiquitous theme in pop music�for every three-minute exultation that comes over the radio there are half a dozen songs whose bleak, crushing themes of disaster are more often than not wrapped in melodies as sweet and upbeat as their euphoric counterparts. It’s curious that this relentless misery doesn’t bother us�or even seem miserable. There’s a kind of sad song that does seem sad, but those who ply their trade by it are usually stuck with a peculiar image and their fans lumped together under a single convenient attribute: all Cure fans wear unnecessary eyeliner; all Elliott Smith fans live in Portland and watch indie films; all Bright Eyes fans are fourteen-year-old girls. The sadness we don’t think strange is the sadness that plays in waiting rooms, in supermarkets, on classic-rock FM stations you can catch airing John Mayer once a week�pop sadness approached traditionally, without grim bombast or heart-on-sleeve poetics. Nothing’s more successful than a straightforward three-minute lament, which is why it’s strange that Erin Moran, who followed up 2001’s Tears All Over Town EP with a full-length in 2004�self-titled after her nom de vinyl �A Girl Called Eddy��hasn’t been more successful herself.

Despite vague satisfied mumblings from critics, Moran’s debut album wasn’t even reviewed in most online publications, let alone in the mainstream media, and became the kind of thing you see in a record store and vaguely consider buying because you might have heard something good about it somewhere. Maybe it was the three-year gap between releases; maybe it was Moran’s sound, split more or less evenly between woozy 1970s singer-songwriter and crystalline 1940s crooner; maybe it was the record’s traditionalism, which ignores any remotely new technology without making a White Stripesian point of it. Whatever it was, it was a shame, because “A Girl Called Eddy” deserved much better.

“The Long Goodbye”�the album’s obvious single and the only song to pull out all the stops and go for full FM-anthem status�is Moran’s most immediately arresting moment, and the shoegaze tendencies of its fuzzy, roaring guitars are the closest she and producer Richard Hawley come to modernity, but it isn’t her best; the intricacies of quieter tracks like the exquisitely slow mid-life-crisis waltz “People Used to Dream About the Future” hold up better over time, and Moran’s soaring, unusually warm voice is better when it’s placed at the extreme forefront of the mix, doing her straightforward, graceful lyrics to perfection. “People” is perhaps better representative of Moran’s work than any other track: its lyrical theme is ancient, its execution is utterly traditional, and its cleverness lacks the merest hint of ostentatiousness or irony. It’s just utterly professional and utterly personal, bafflingly simultaneously, and for five and a half minutes puts nary a foot wrong. The album’s deftness is no less evident on brighter tracks like “Life Thru the Same Lens,” whose endearingly awkward metaphor (”my prescription must have been all wrong”) is buoyed by a sunny percussion section and offhand background vocals. These songs are jewels�dug up and displayed a thousand times before, but never in this case, and never at this angle. And in the arena of pop melancholy, that’s more effective�and rarer�than you’d think.

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