I tend to be favorably impressed with artists who dare to be unfashionable, particularly unfashionably open in their emotions. In a way, my attitude mirrors the typical critical love of risk-taking - because such open-hearted surgery always runs the risk of making the artist look like a weepy, blubbering idiot. It's so much easier to play it cool - but cool is such a cliché that even the teared eye behind the dark sunglasses is its own cliché. So anyway, yes, Smart Brown Handbag seems like a stage for main guy David Steinhart's emotional dramas. One song dispenses with the usual narrative distance by namechecking "the Steinhart family...reunion," and the music, production, and Steinhart's vocals evoke the sort of oversized yearning that once crashed Kitchens of Distinction foaming to its rocky emotional shores. And Smart Brown Handbag writes catchy songs: the choruses to "Plastic Babies" and "Greetings from the Longest Weekend (Of Trying to Stay Thankful)" were pre-embedded in my brain, it seems, since they sounded familiar the first time I heard them. But if that were all this band did, they wouldn't yet have done much to avoid the weeping and blubbering thing. Careful readers may have noticed that I elided a word in quoting the line about the family reunion: the missing word is "retail," and the rather acidic edge it lends to a potentially sappy topic is the secret citrus to cut the emotional sucrose of this CD. The band actually entitles a song "I Love Everyone," and Steinhart actually sings it in the manner of a big-time Christian lounge-act entertainer with microphone color-coordinated with his tie...but the same song notes that "the strings of comfort play a sickly sweet tune" and generally evoke entrapment and emotional placidity. So it's no surprise that it's not the narrator singing "I love everyone" but someone calling "from a better space...from somewhere long ago" who sings it. Think of Smart Brown Handbag as the anti-Pavement: rather than affectless, ironic singing sometimes hiding open sentiment (and great tunes), they proffer big, vibrant singing hiding absence and emotional flatness. And great tunes. Annoy the shallow-listening cynic; please the cynic who listens closely.

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