From what I can tell, the cover painting of Matt Pond's latest EP depicts a Siamese-pair of scraggly cedar trees rendered in grim blackish-green over a barren and splotchy bone-hued background. But, really, it's more of a Rorschach stain than anything else. Like the cover design, Matt Pond PA crafts songs at once pretty and chilly, yet also vague enough to settle into your head without drawing undue attention to themselves-- perhaps even letting you project something of your own into them. Or, uh, not.

I Thought You Were Sleeping is a fleeting five-song affair that makes its bittersweet point and departs before you can so much as formulate a response. If you're a sucker for lush, expertly arranged, and unabashedly wussy pop, you'll be revisiting these plaintive mid-tempo gems many times, with each listen leaving you wanting more. Like its well-received predecessor, Measure, I Thought You Were Sleeping packs a wealth of content into a short timespan, opting for quality over quantity. A whole full-length's worth of high quality material like these few tracks would be a best of year's list shoe-in.

The opening number, "Other Countries," is a waltzy, orchestral song that showcases Pond's skills as an arranger. He combines guitar arpeggios, violin, cello, and brass into a gorgeously cohesive whole over which to lay his lugubrious but pleasantly solid voice. Pond's singing-- and, honest, I mean this in the best possible way-- falls somewhere between Elliott Smith and Evan Dando with a morose dash of Robert Smith (all the world's Prozac). The second track, "Put Your Hair Down," wins top-honors in my book. Again, Pond's arrangement takes center stage, this time playing a simple distorted guitar melody and vibraphone off each other. The cymbal-happy drumming and melody are no less great. This is low-key pop at its best.

We now step into almost shoegazery turf with "St. Andrews," the truncated third track. Seemingly over before it's begun, the "song" is more of a frenzied and effected segue for the arctic lament of track four, "I Thought You Were Sleeping"; nevertheless, this transition-by-contrast works quite well. The penultimate track is little more than acoustic guitar strumming, cello, and the odd keyboard effect, but it's easily the most somber point of the EP, sketching out a bare portrait of music and melody you're all too eager to fill in.

"Measure 5," the closing number, is not the strongest, but perhaps the most accessible of the five. Still, the mood here also skirts dangerously close to the cheesy self-parodic outskirts of "emotional" music. Not surprisingly, the Robert Smith strain of Pond's voice is more apparent here than anywhere else. All that said, it's still a beautiful song, whether or not it should be closing credits music to a teen romance flick. Hopefully, the next full-length by Matt Pond PA will have been taken from the same sessions that gave rise to these almost overly-sentimental but rich, memorable songs.

-Camilo Arturo Leslie