Jon Hardy & The Public – Working In Love

In his enthusiastic No Depression review of Jon Hardy and the Public’s first album, Make Me Like Gold, Ed Ward recognized the “weirdness” of the band’s take on Americana and their original reworking of inevitable sources like The Band, Dylan and Young. Indie-rock listeners will surely hear another echo, that of Spoon’s Britt Daniel, a comparison Hardy has either learned to live with or learned to laugh off.

Ultimately, a songwriter and band leader this confident and talented couldn’t copy another if he tried. As it turns out, the St. Louisian’s second album surpasses the first — in hooks, emotion, production, coherence and heart — and often sounds like the work of a different songwriter and band entirely.

A collection of love songs with sparkling choruses that realize and raise unequivocal pop melodies, the album bids farewell to alt-country influences for a punchy and pretty ’60s blue-eyed southern soul ethos — electric piano, deep horn lines, and tight, instantly danceable grooves — with the faintest, finest traces of power-pop at the edges. Surrounded by that sound, Hardy never grandstands, never reaches for cryptic metaphors when the simplest, straightest line to emotion is the truest.

“Tonight I am not a singer,” he lies on “My Love”. “Because these words should be much bigger, and the sound will be more than this song.” But songs this good, and sounds this soulful, always are.