he debut album from Seattle quartet Welcome is both a vivid reminder and unwelcome flashback of my age. Entering my thirties, I’ve been hunkered down in the trenches, scouring rosters of the defunct independent labels from the ’90s (Alias, Kindercore, Flydaddy anyone?), in an effort to combat the inevitable war of nostalgia that younger bands are beginning to wage. It’s certainly not wrong to resurrect the golden age of indie rock, which to my personal approximation began with Slanted and Enchanted (purchased the same night I lost my virginity) and ended with the release of the Strokes first album (about the time I realized all women are crazy). It was a time when Sebadoh and Superchunk were temporary saviors, when Robert Pollard was considered a thrift-store Lennon, and the Elephant Six Collective was exploring unmatched kaleidoscopic pop landscapes. Regrettably, it was also a time when you could sit through an entire Sunny Day Real Estate album (insert Butterfly Train, Number One Cup, or Promise Ring) with a straight face.

Welcome revel in both the best and the worst of those times, frequently steering their sturdy ship on a clear course by reintroducing those soaring melodies and scruffy quirks on a calm, newly salted sea. Occasionally though, Sirs weathers through a craggy, uncomfortable wasteland, like a child trying to piece together fragments of a broken puzzle.

Initially, the band is promising. “All Set” can claim the Lilys as its next of kin. A sighing Kurt Heasley sits in the corner, pondering his achievements, and realizing only a select few actually cared enough. Welcome not only does the Lily’s leader justice by adhering to his strict diet of ’60s psych (Byrds, Beatles, and especially the Kinks) reflected through cracked lenses, but one-up his skewed take on revivalism by dabbling in atonal dynamics and awkward shifts, welding on sharp, Polvo-esque, appendages to perfectly acceptable melodic forms. This is a mod-hop through a steel mill.

“First” goes a step further, straddling a tightrope somewhere between Pavement’s epic “Grounded” and Built to Spill’s “Randy Described Eternity,” as singer and guitarist Pete Brand channels both Malkmus’s dourness and Martsch’s optimism while weighted with unrest compliments of an interlude of demented strings or the song’s eventual collapse into noisy, malleable, ephemera. Forgive me for the aforementioned nostalgia that’s eating at my skin, but the next track, “Natural Frost” re-sets the emotions completely, feeling eerily like the first time I heard Archer’s of Loaf’s Icky Mettle; incompetent and roughshod, a fuck-all abandon reserved for punk but fittingly appropriate for the gilded age I speak of.

Therein lays Welcome’s curse. They are professional about being unprofessional, assembling intentional unintentionals such as false starts, clipped riffs, amp drops, and feedback fissures, to resemble reckless garage rock, but they remain polished enough to sustain an air of something new and fresh. Almost depressingly though, Sirs’s second half can’t muster the same boundless energy of its first, replacing solid melodies and ideas with hook-less caterwauling and bassist’s Jo Claxton’s misplaced Breeders tributes; so out of place are songs like “Bunky” and “This Minute” it’s as if another band is playing.

A conservative trimming would make Sirs a triumph of a short-player, giving the hungry, armor-clad, warrior rallying for the rebirth of Truman’s Water something to chew on, but for those of us who have heard it all before, we need more sustenance, something that challenges the ideas that made the (mid-to-late) ’90s such a swinging good time.