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*** Love Tractor

THE SKY AT NIGHT

(Razor and Tie)

It’s fitting in a way that the Steely Dan of the mid-’80s Southern-pop revival have released their first album in 12 years right after Becker and Fagen got a Grammy for their comeback. The Dan comparison, moreover, is apt. Love Tractor were a great live act, as their unlikely 1987 cover of the Gap Band’s “Party Train” suggested. But at their best these precious college-radio darlings combined the herky-jerk of Pylon and the graceful arpeggios of early R.E.M. with a kind of icy, meticulous virtuosity: they were a bar band totally comfortable layering overdubs in a sterile recording studio.

Nothing’s changed on The Sky at Night. One listen to the delicate, folkie, guitar lattice work and vocal harmonies on “US Desert” or the trebly bliss of “Palace of Illusion” (trimmed with killer, circa 1986 keyboard bursts) and you’ll swear the ’90s never happened. Then again, on the mostly instrumental “Birthday of Time,” a film soundtrack waiting for a film, Love Tractor prove themselves honest-to-God precursors of spacy, ambient techno. But forget about “relevance” and the thinness of some of the songwriting here. For any one-time high-school kid from suburban nowhere who imagined Athens as a dreamy, jangle-pop paradise, The Sky at Night will be as evocative as Proust’s Madeleine.

— Jeff Ousborne