Truxton

The debut album by the San Francisco trio Truxton — singer/songwriter Hansi (Johannes Armentrout), bassist Lucas White, and drummer Francis Choung (also one-third of the politicized post-rockers From Monument to Masses) — makes a compelling case concerning what would have happened if Neil Young had been a struggling young singer/songwriter breaking into the California scene more than 35 years after he did. Hansi's meandering vocals and pretty/harsh guitar style both suggest a strong Young influence, which meshes surprisingly well with the Dashboard Confessional-meets-Sunny Day Real Estate emo vibe of his cohorts. It's not a stretch to imagine the predominantly acoustic and atypically poppy "Same Short Song," or even the cyclical, occasionally abrasive "Let the Bullets Fly," on a Buffalo Springfield album, and that pop sensibility anchors even otherwise standard emo dirges as "Submarines." Recorded over the span of several years, Truxton's debut hangs together surprisingly well, a testament to the fundamental solidity of Hansi's emotional, but not overweening lyrical, stance and subtle sense of pop hooks.