h, spring. When recording an album during that season of blooming flowers and warm showers, it’s hard not to let it seep into your music. On Polaroid, Salim Nourallah’s first release under his first name, and without his brother, he captures a snapshot of his life during the spring of 2003.

A husband-of-three family man, Salim is obviously a man who holds familial ties close to his heart. For years he and his brother recorded under the Nourallah Brothers moniker. Praised for their Pernice Brothers-plus-Wilco-minus-pretensions sound, they eventually had a falling out (which Salim references on “Model Brothers”), leading them to abandon that moniker and each to set out on their own.

Now I’ll admit that when I first picked up Polaroid and gazed at the cliché sounding song titles on the back, such as “Waiting for You,” “Everybody Wants to Be Loved,” and “Christmas Eve,” I was bracing for sub-par, trite alt. pop.

I was proved wrong. While Salim doesn’t tackle anything more weighty in subject matter than an autobiographical tale of Faulknerian family decay, he pulls it off incredibly well (His side project, Happiness Factor, is supposedly his outlet for his feelings on politics and social concerns.) Like the band Spain (which also has cliché song titles, but gets away with it), Salim’s lyrics aren’t going to send you running for the thesaurus or for your friends interpretation of a specific lyric, but because Salim’s emotions seem genuine, that’s perfectly fine.

From the rainy melancholy of “Everybody Wants to Be Loved,” (which is much better than it sounds) and the Spanish-tinged “The Ones Who Hurt Us,” to the retro (and wonderfully produced) sun-pop of the single, “1978,” Polaroid works because Salim keeps everything—his aged surfer-as-balladeer voice, his light instrumentation—understated and underwhelming in the best sense of the words.

And isn’t this what an artist should be? Someone who is able to communicate clearly and bases their art around experiences, instead of aping of trends or tailoring craft to the zeitgeist? An artist is not only as good as his influences, but is only as good as himself. And Salim is doing just fine.