Aminal

If pop music is a wild animal, then this Chapel Hill trio’s domesticated it, teaching it to sit up, roll over and lay in their lap. Their songs amble with unhurried grace and purr with ineffable charm. Frontman Patrick O’Neill has a gift for vocal melodies that insinuate themselves into your confidences so completely that, after a couple of listens, you’re ready to buy them a round of drinks. The songs boast a woozy ebb and flow fueled by a vibrant rhythm section that’s capable of unspooling the sound with the measured skill of a master angler loosening and locking his reel.

Aminal’s music mixes rootsy ringing guitars, British Invasion melodicism and winsome indie pop, though the sound doesn’t really suggest anything in particular. Keyboards colored in many of the backgrounds and accented the melodies on last year’s twin debut EPs, A Face to Fight and Will to Fight, so it’s disappointing that their original keyboardist Mark Reidy left in September, leaving Aminal looking for a replacement. However, March’s live session at WKNC (available from the station website) prove they’re still quite capable as threesome. The tracks are more stripped-down and straight-ahead, tending more toward the rock side of things, particularly on “Loud It’s You,” the tentative title track from their forthcoming full-length debut, due later this year. Its torrential chiming guitar chords recall The Wedding Present, as O’Neill meditates on the long and rainy road, and noise of waking up.

The pedigree of O’Neill, who mans keyboards in Honored Guests, and drummer Cameron Weeks, who’s played locally with Black Skies and The Comas, suggests that their terrific EPs are only the beginning. —Chris Parker