[DREAMY LOVE-POP] Loving relationships have their perks and all, but they're not just cherries and chocolate and sweet romance. And Portland songwriter Jason Parker knows it. Still, it's hard to tell if his band's debut, Popstar on the Lam, was meant to be listened to while embracing the one you love or alone in a dark, cold bedroom. It could go either way.

The band's slew of multi-instrumentalists—Mica Rapstine, Josh Steiner, Tony Moreno (a sometime member of fuzz-folk outfit Norfolk & Western) and Parker himself—create a lush, twinkling pillow of orchestration on which you can slip into a deep, peaceful sleep—or bury your crying face. Either way, the keys, electronics, percussion and strings adapt with fine-tuned restraint to Parker's fey vocals and breezy yet reflective narratives. And soul-searching is branded all over the album right from the get-go: "Cal-ifor-ni-ay," with a backwoods yokel pronunciation perhaps stemming from Parker's Texan roots, opens with a spare, melancholic organ and Parker's airy voice chiming, "Cal-ifor-ni-ay/ A thousand times you drive away/ But there's no gettin' 'round the fact:/ You're in love."

The song sets the mood for the 36-minute album, which reveals a mixed-up narrator who's running away from the past, looking forward to what's down the road and enjoying at least some of the journey. The title track, for instance, with its graceful, wavering harmonica, captures the gentler elegance of similarly wistful outfit Spiritualized. And "What the Suicide Did," which could be the lost product of a New Year/American Analog Set collaboration, offers a welcome respite to life's woes. But more spare songs—like the acoustic "When the Cops Use Their Guns" and dagger-in-the-back piano number "Companions"—aren't afraid to show how fucked up relationships can be.

Other tracks, like the album's atmospheric dream-rock epic, "We All Agree, It's a Wasteland" (which eerily echoes the U.K.-based bedroom-act Maps), sound lovely but are laced with despair. But even "Wasteland," like much of the record, gives way to a sense of redemption (if only by way of amnesia). And, ultimately, listeners are left with no choice but to fall in love. .