I was in Baltimore for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature conference. Picture Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, and bushy-bearded southern Pentecostals moving through banal convention center hallways, lounging on the provided chairs, swapping iPhone cables and visions of God in the shadows of a recovered Roman miniature barge from Ben-Hur, which they have in Baltimore for some reason. It was a clear morning, the last before the mist and winter storm, and I was spread out, exhausted, in my hotel room. I was staying in Fell’s Point — which, if you’ve ever been there — is a touristy “historical” district with old harbor architecture and cobblestone streets. The night before, Saturday night, the ghost tour had been out — pretty college girls earning part-time wage to wander past the bars and record shops, pointing out the places where men died when there was still sufficient poverty in Fell’s Point to kill them.

So, here I was, Sunday morning, pacing in a small and well-furnished chamber, laptop open, going through the last little bit of Mike’s big dispatch of new singles. I’d hit a bad stretch. Every single band was some jangly, acoustic “emotional” junk — lots of “Mumford and Sons meets” in the description. The whole thing was turning my mood rotten, and I was starting to resent the cloudless blue beyond the windows — didn’t this day, this town, have the basic decency to rain?

The thing about this sound — I don’t know what to call it, aside from “shit”— is that it only works if the people playing it are able to access some kind of sincerity. Any asshole can pick up an acoustic guitar and clamber to a microphone, unwinding little aphorisms about love and pain — but the people who make it work aren’t there for the lyrics, or the playing. They’re there for the feeling behind them. If you wanna be a pseudo-folky in 2013, you gotta be a window into someplace dark and long-occupied. Otherwise, you just go through the motions, pretending to feel, and the whole thing comes off as shallow and exploitative. Honestly, I think this sincerity should be thought of as a technical skill — it has to be thought out, carefully pruned. But it can’t be too technical, right, because then you actually end up with Mumford and Sons, who produce the exact sound of a mandolin filling out its tax returns.

In Baltimore, I put on Selah, the new album by Swedish artist David Åhlén. And, hey, there it was — sincerity. The track I’m sharing is “Linger,” the album’s first, because it comes on like cold water — no ornaments. Just a straight shot of mood, of feeling, and when you really dig into it you can see that it’s not sparse. Just listen to “Linger,” then slip into track two. Smoke a joint and let it work you over gently. You won’t regret it.

This is a bullshit world. Bullshit history, lousy bullshit spaces, miserable bullshit culture. It’s also, for the moment, a world where bands are trying to make it by coming off as acoustic, non-threatening and honest — and even that’s bullshit most of the time. Try fitting God into the Baltimore convention center. Trying talking about death, real death, in Fell’s point, right outside the 7-11. Or don’t.

The point is, through all this bullshit, there’s still some people working very hard, in their minimal way, to put out some truth. That Sunday morning in Baltimore was marked with a kind of teeth-grinding agitation, the low-level hurt of feeling a profound disconnect between the world in my skull and beyond the sockets of my eyes. Then, “Linger.” Suddenly the sky made sense. I sat down. Rested. Prepared for the rest of the day’s sounds, which would not be so understanding.

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Pop music is seasonal. There’s some bands that only make sense in the dead-heat of summer, others that pop especially in Spring, still others that only make sense when the skies are silver and the air is cold. Amycanbe has a real winter sound — the steady, unhurried bass on “Buffalos” courses between crystalline pianos and vocals that sound like the love child of Joanna Newsom and Wednesday Addams. This is a pretty good reflection of Mountain Whales as a whole, although “Buffalos” is by far the loneliest and most accomplished track on offer. File this under long walks and first snowfalls. Then look at the video. It’s literally a long walk on a cold night, which brings me to my issue with this record.

There’s one tone here, one ivory key on the emotional spectrum, and Amycanbe keeps hitting it again and again over the course of Mountain Whales. I like it, I enjoy it, and in the proper season and state of mind I can even find some resonance in it — but, somewhere, beneath the technical skill and the pitched emotion of these recordings, there’s a superficial heart. Winter nights don’t last forever and even the longest walk eventually ends, even if it’s just to sleep at a bus shelter or something… Where the hell are we going with all this, Amycanbe? I kind of want them to follow up this L.P. with some Gravy Train or Los Campesinos! shit and reveal that all this time we were headed to McDonalds, where everybody is going to fuck each other and party. At least it’s warm in there…

Look, I think you should buy this record, if you haven’t already. I think you should spring for the limited vinyl, if only because it’s gorgeous and Feedbands is an idea that’s so good it’s basically guaranteed to go out of business and become a weird fetish for degenerate record collectors. I think “Buffalos” is a great track, and worthy of some discussion — the central image reminds me of Frank Moore’s paintings of bison herding along the snowscapes of empty beds. But I also think you should carefully manage your enthusiasm.

This band is either going to get smarter, more fun or stay exactly the same. No matter what, they’ll accrue some fans. But unless they follow one of the first few tracks I won’t be one of them. Red pen on the white record sleeve: “B+, show more, alternate your Byron with some Kenneth Patchen or back issues of Thorazine.”

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I met her at Bowery Electric, while the Hereticks were playing. Young, blonde, good looking — whatever that means to you. She was bobbing at the other end of the crowd, dancing near Wes Maffley-Kipp, who was dividing his attention between her and the bass. Hers was a look of gravity. After the second encore, it pulled me in.

I forget what I said first. There was a burst blood vessel in her eye — a flood of red made brilliant violet by the aquarium neon of the bar. Her name was Vanessa. She was unimpressed with me.

The rest of the night shook out pretty well, all things considered. She wanted coke. I had some. We repaired to the toilet and alternated bumps, doing a line off a copy of This Engine, the Hereticks’ first album, released February 2013. It’s a good record, but neither of us were thinking about that. I had her phone number in my pocket when I left town the next day.

After that — who can say? We met up, went out a few times, developed some comfortable and unexciting routines. Her taste in records was an issue — she hated punk, indulged in the occasional top 40 station, made fun of me for listening the The Selecter as if there was no difference between the second and third waves of ska… Sex has never been my strong suit but we got by. Her parents liked me, after a while.

Then things went bad — they had to, right? No thrown dishes or anything — no fights, really. Just coldness. Little jokes, reliable compliments — they all started ending up dead. Somehow, without either of us knowing the mechanism at work, the little procedural kindnesses upon which any relationship is based went cold, stopped carrying charge. She still calls, sometimes. We catch up in a perfunctory way. Still — it was a worthwhile thing, like all deep scars.

Meet the Hereticks. They’re from Austin and they put out an album last spring, an EP just now. Check out “Promised Land,” which creeps up on a Morse code strand before exploding into a kind of sardonic  desolation powered by Wes Maffley-Kipp’s bass and ethereal keyboard hits from Waldo Wittenmyer. It’s a melancholy song, with a touch of self reproach. See also “I Only Pretend,” parts one and two, which strikes at similar territory in a more bouncy, pop-folk kind of way.

This is a weird band. Live, that night I saw them at the Bowery, they came on like a stick of reverse dynamite, blasting people into the bar instead of out of it. These guys ooze charisma; it’s a bodily secretion for them, draining out of the cuffs of their shirts and the pipes of their jeans, pooling bright purple on the stage. And it’s easy, faced with that kind of showmanship, to get distracted. Putting on their EP, as I did the week after the show, was a little bit of a shock. This is a band with a serious drive and an intellect fully equipped with eyes, hair and teeth. “Promised Land” hits a spot of weird, spectral guilt: it’s a song about the realizing you’re not the kind of person anyone would write a song about. “I Only Pretend” is a little balder in this declaration, but slightly less interesting musically (with the exception of a few whip-crack guitar hits right before the final line). Their full-length, This Engine, is rougher but treads similarly complex emotional waters. Tracks to consider: “Dancing in the Snow” and “Once Upon the End.”

This is an act I’m still digesting in a lot of ways. They seem to exist in a muddled, limited space between pop music as popular poetry and pop music as adolescent celebration. They have it in them, I’m sure, to put out much, much less cerebral stuff. Maybe they will in the future — but for now, I’m glad they haven’t. This is what you should put on if you have some things to figure out, some failures whose genealogy seems inexplicable. This music for life’s blind spot.

Hereticks at Bowery Electric was one of the best shows I have ever seen. Full crowd, private booth, gallons of gin — the out-of-body experience of a real cocaine tear, driving all our souls until they plonked against the low, black roof of the bar… Everyone was into it, I thought: moving together, operating as cells of some vast entity, all difference collapsed. I was at my best, that night, I thought. Listening to the EP, later, I realized that — if true — my assessment was depressing. Maybe the best we have is just the hubris of looking someone the eyes and believing, really believing, that the brain behind is open and capable of love. “It’s been over since we left the trees,” sing the Hereticks, at the close of “I Only Pretend.”

For them, maybe. It ended for me when the last encore finished at Electric. I’d been watching her across the crowd the whole time, feeling strange, compelled, intoxicated. All it would take, I thought, was a few moments of total presence. 

I was doing key bumps in the men’s room when she slipped away.

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