Tram

Though the comparisons to Nick Drake, Low and Belle & Sebastian both haunted and helped Tram early on in their career, the band has finally come into their own with their third album. A Kind of Closure is an extremely beautiful and velvety recording of simple songs to pierce anyone's heart. Led by the songwriting and singing talents of Paul Anderson, Tram has added a fair amount of strings to give a more delicate and almost eerie feeling to the band's minimal sound. Anderson's vocals have changed as well, sounding a little more vulnerable and more inclined to break down and bare his soul. The loveliest song on here has to be the country-tinged love song "Painful Education," where Anderson is accompanied by a lonesome female voice that makes the precious duet extremely hard not to cry during. With each record, Tram seems to top the one before, and while A Kind of Closure isn't the masterpiece they are capable of, it does better their two previous efforts and shows that some day soon they will make that classic record.