You’re forgiven for being wary of the Long Winters. The indie-kid hype snowballing in your peripheral vision and the frequent use of phrases like “softhearted,” “earnest,” and, worst of all, “Seattle indie darlings” give you the right to think about sitting this one out. And, if you did, you’d almost be making the right decision—almost, but not quite, and here’s why you should be paying more attention.

John Roderick’s first album under the Long Winters name, The Worst You Can Do Is Harm, almost doesn’t count; straining and precious, it disappointed those intrigued by its demi-supergroup lineup, and perhaps inflated the critical relief felt when Roderick’s sophomore effort, When I Pretend To Fall, turned out to be more what you’d hope for from a record featuring members of Built to Spill, the Posies, and Death Cab for Cutie as session musicians. More graceful than its predecessor, When I Pretend To Fall is still overlong and patchy, and Roderick’s high-register voice can be grating when he chooses the wrong moment to belt, but the moments, not infrequent, when the band hits the target accomplish two things: first, they sound great, as in the deftly affected lope of “Bride and Bridle,” or the brief shot of bratty power-pop on “New Girl,” whose Good Charlotte tendencies are redeemed by wry lyrics and the occasional tinkle of joyously incongruous saloon piano; second, they dizzy with their improvement over the Long Winters’ previous work, and demonstrate that a band particularly self-satisfied critics once dismissed as a Seattle circle-jerk or community-theatre Death Cab (I’m quoting myself here) might have somewhere big to go.

And damned if they aren’t almost there. Last October’s Ultimatum EP, featuring four new songs and two live cuts, is a milestone the same way Summerteeth or Building Nothing Out Of Something was—the sound of the first crack in the ceiling. The easygoing resignation of “Delicate Hands,” in which Roderick’s smart-enough-to-be-earnest keen is harnessed to a cantoring drumbeat, resembles the high points on When I Pretend To Fall taken the extra five percent; and the flawless production job on the you’re-going-to-hear-this-everywhere “The Commander Thinks Aloud” gives the Long Winters their first bona fide anthem. These are sentimental songs with ironic sheens, or ironic songs with sentimental sheens—either way, they succeed in the same cracked, idiosyncratic way Death Cab songs did before Ben Gibbard decided to stick with sentimental.

We’ve grown accustomed recently to receiving our new favorite bands as readymade prodigies—Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and M.I.A. both released debut albums last year with shelf lives as long as their artists’, albums people will talk about as long as they’re talking about the people who made them. It’s been a while since a sensational band started off quietly and clambered into greatness, leaving their early wanderings to join the catalog of such apocrypha as “A.M.” or “Feel Good Lost” or, hey, “Bob Dylan”. The Long Winters could still slip and fall, and they haven’t given us a masterpiece yet. But if they keep this pace, it’s coming up next.

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