Tancred is the nom de side project of Now, Now guitarist/vocalist Jess Abbott, and while Capes won’t feel unfamiliar to those acquainted with her main focus, it has a character and charm all its own. Capes was written and performed entirely by Abbott, a Mainer transplanted to Minnesota, and her compositions are steeped in their shared terroir — the cool pastoral sensibility, the gray ache of leafless trees and endless autumn, cold places heated with warm hearts half by necessity.

Sonically, there’s no shortage of easy touchstones — the nascent half-songs and fitful fever dreams of early Guided By Voices, the undersung melodies and sweetly-twinned harmonies of Azure Ray, the stripped and ramshackle simplicity of Beat Happening, the gauzy nostalgic thrum of American Football. But if the sound of Capes is easy to pigeonhole, that’s a reflection of its finer qualities —  the album is sharply focused, concise, and of a piece (at a mere 18:49 running time, it’s clearly meant to be listened to as a work undivided).

That brevity can be frustrating at times. “East” slowly flowers into a mellifluous warm mantra of coos, but comes to an abrupt halt just as it begins to take flight;  “Old Fashioned” burns out after a single chorus. Ultimately, though, the curtness of each piece suits the album’s less-is-more spirit. There’s a sense that it’s a frustration the narrator shares, the sinking realization of good things cut short before their time.  Capes’s characters all seem to find themselves in an unwelcome flux, in the throes of losing something, and that emotion oozes into the structures of its songs. Abbott leaves the details fuzzy; in doing so, she imbues her compositions with a particular universality. It’s a credit to her skill as a nontraditional songwriter.

As much as anything else, Capes belongs to the great rock tradition of “road songs,” rife with references to streets and cars and passengers, travel as metaphor for the distance in relationships, travel as a catalyst for distance (and vice versa), a world of empty spaces and empty places both inner and outer, that liminal point where the distinction between “who’s left and who’s leaving” (as The Weakerthans artfully put it) blurs. The album is even subdivided by instrumental pieces named for the cardinal directions. But Abbott’s songs are not about particular locations; rather, they seem to live in a perpetual inbetween.

The penultimate track on Capes, “Two Years,” captures the album’s spirit best — a simple drone-poem accompanied by stark acoustic guitar, Abbott repeating “I can’t see you in this light” as the song itself fades like a sunset. It’s a little hard to see anything in Tancred’s world, but you can just barely make out the edges of something sadly beautiful through its haze.

****/*****

*This review was composed by Jesse Richman