Of all the arts, music has the greatest ability to make an inseverable emotional connection with its audience. We do not swear loyalty to books or films the way we do to music. “But,” you say, “what of Lord of the Rings fans? Rocky Horror fans? Surely the kind of rapturous worship we see in both these cases stands with the strongest music has to offer.” To this I say: wander around your local mall at about 8:00 P.M. until you find a Tool fan, then tell him that Tool sucks. See?

Because it hugs one’s brain so closely, music is difficult to criticize in any meaningful way. There is no way to hermetically experience music; whatever the intrinsic qualities of a song or symphony or concerto, it acquires a whole host of external associations for each listener that will not only augment but almost certainly subsume the music itself. I cannot remember where I first read Catch-22, but I can recall with absolute accuracy the precise moment, location, and state of mind in which I first heard Eiffel 65’s “Blue.” Furthermore, when I hear people make that kind of snarky remark about “Blue,” I get defensive, as if it is not vacuous techno-pop they are condemning but the really big trampoline my friend Cameron used to have in his front yard. Imagine the kind of person who would condemn a trampoline and you will understand why the Tool fan hates you so.

This brings us to The Boy Least Likely To. In July of this year, the British indie-pop duo released their debut album, The Best Party Ever, in the UK; it is slated for an American release next April. It is indie-pop in the indie-poppiest sense of the word: every melody is lilting and giggly, every instrument a music-box condensation of its normal self; every word from Jof Owen’s lips a trembling, fragile sigh. Owen sings of the kind of childlike naivete and idealized love you’d expect from a band that sounds like this, though he adds the same neurotic bite that lets Woody Allen get away with being sappy. The band is joyful, intelligently earnest, and loveable. Either that or they’re saccharine, twee, and disgustingly superficial. I don’t know, and this is why:

There was this girl. I was infatuated with her in a way that would have made Jof Owen throw up and demand some Throbbing Gristle, but things didn’t work out. The place where they didn’t work out was the parking lot of my friend’s apartment, where he lives with his fiance. It was late and they suggested I stay the night. It was difficult for me to refuse because at the time I did not have a car and was several miles from my usual bed, and the public transportation in Hilo, Hawaii is not so much poor as it is nonexistent. So I spent the night, and then for one reason or another I woke up at about 5:30 and couldn’t get to sleep again. Aside from the fallout from the recent girl I had work to do, un-fun work, and I didn’t want to spend too much of the day hanging around my friend’s apartment watching The O.C. on DVD. I waited for him to wake up but he didn’t, and he looked so peaceful, and his fiance so protective, that I left a note thanking them and set out to walk home.

I was to encounter two problems. The first was that I had no shoes. No matter, I thought, my brain still half submerged in a yearning dreamworld in which I scaled mountains and massacred bison, I am a tough person with tough feet. The second was that my headphones, which had been placed, the previous night, on a coffee table with my Discman, had at some point during the small hours decided I was no longer worthy of their service. A few moments of unprofessionally violent experimentation revealed that they could be made to work, if I asked them really nicely and also wrapped the wire six times around my right index finger and braced it rigidly against the Discman in a pose that, held for too long, would cause me to develop hands like a Batman villain. So I stumbled out of the apartment, blinking in the sunlight, feet bare, CD player whirring in my clawed hand, and stepped on a very sharp rock. And at the same time The Best Party Ever began playing.

The first song on The Best Party Ever is called “Be Gentle With Me.” Owen and bandmate Pete Hobbs have assembled it from xylophones and guitars the way an eight-year-old draws comics under the covers after his bedtime. The lyrics veer from the farthest reaches of the solar system to the innermost insignificance of the narrator, who makes the titular request with the widest of eyes, the most hopeful of smiles, in between verses of paranoia and childish fear—”Wide awake, waiting like a target / Listening for things I cannot see”—that collapse, always, into ever-so-slightly self-aware absurdities—”Insects flutter up against my window / I don’t like the way they look at me.” This, in fact, is the structure of the entire album. The world of The Boy Least Likely To is fuzzy, pastel, prepubescent, but lurking around the edges, in plain and distressing sight, are unimaginable horrors, laying constant siege to the cotton-candy fortress from which Owen sings: monsters, broken hearts, failed dreams, and, of course, death, the patient, omnipresent mother of them all. Owen sleeps with a gun under his pillow; he’s scared of the countryside; and he is disturbingly and unshakably aware that “from little air bubbles, little embolisms grow”.

The album’s masterpiece, though, is “Paper Cuts,” a cleaner creation from “Be Gentle With Me”’s neurotic-love-song template. Over a finger-painted melody made mostly of bass, drums, and chirping synths, Owen interrupts another laundry list of neuroses with a compulsively blurted declaration of love, before dismissing all that came before as trivial—”They’re just paper cuts / I’ll Sela-tape them up / And bandage them with cotton wool and glue,” he resolves, before admitting that he shouldn’t “beat myself up over little things the way I do.” That all this is saved from bathos is a small miracle, and has to do with Pete Hobbs’ deft, sunny instrumentation and Owen’s straightforward, unaffected delivery. In any number of other hands this song could have been insufferable, but Hobbs and Owen pull it off: what we get is not an adolescent feeling sorry for himself, but a man acknowledging the child in him.

There’s a chance, though, that they don’t pull it off. There’s a chance that all the beauty and finesse I see in “Be Gentle With Me” is the result of one thing: when I hear it, I step on that rock again. There’s no way I can have one experience without the other. There’s no way I can hear “The Best Party Ever” without thinking of that trek home - of the sunheated pavement; of the broken glass; of the flickering headphones; of my aching right hand; of my friend Jody, who shot by in the other direction in an air-conditioned car and waved with the kind of cheerfulness that is in some states a capital offense. And, of course, of the disappointment of the night before. Like any piece of music, most of my perception of it is based on things of which its creators never conceived. But there’s a difference, I think, between The Boy Least Likely To and Eiffel 65—a difference between music that latches onto anything and music that has a say in what experience it’ll call back for the rest of your life. I’d heard The Best Party Ever before, but it hadn’t hit yet; I have a feeling it’s not an accident I associate it with this story. Because I did, of course, make it home that day, and I made pretty good time, too. And so what if things didn’t work out with the girl? And so what if she’s now a model? And so what if we’re all going to be eaten by monsters, bitten by spiders, if we’re all going to fail, be heartbroken, if we’re all going to grow old—if we’re all going to die? We can always walk home!

That’s how these songs make me feel, and it’s a good bet that that’s how they’ll make you feel, too—not because this story happened to you, but because this band is good enough to hold its own against our experience. Anyway, when I listen to the album now, and its first notes ring through my brand-new headphones, and I feel the rock on my bare foot, it hurts, but I’m glad it does; it lets me know all this really happened. And it’s not so bad, really. Nothing a little Sela-tape can’t fix.

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