The story of a lonely, sensitive and probably unemployed white dude whiling away his days with only his Macbook Pro and a guitar for company and then channeling his limited knowledge of the outside world and nostalgia for a decade he’s never lived through into softly-softly dream pop tracks isn’t particularly exciting. But this is pretty much the background to California’s Craft Spells. The solitary man in this case is Justin Paul Vallesteros, and the album that has come out of his bedroom strumming is the sweet, detached and melodic Idle Labor.

Vallesteros got his first bit of momentum in autumn last year, when blogs were raving about ‘Party Talk’, a nice enough, slightly bouncy track that combined ringing guitars with hazy, indifferent vocals – it didn’t sound that different to a lot of other Captured Tracks artists, and it certainly isn’t the best track on Craft Spells’ first record.

Whatever your reservations about this often forcibly otherworldly, blog-friendly genre – when executed well, it can be immensely evocative and even fun to lose yourself in. Vallesteros and his bandmates have mastered this art, and as a result, Idle Labor works well as an escapist record. Not a full-blown removal from reality, granted – it’s more like smoking your first filterless roll-up after a week-long cold. The rush is short but sweet, and most importantly, familiar.

‘The Fog Rose High’ has a guitar line that calls to mind New Order’s ‘Love Vigilante’, and ‘Given The Time’, after starting out like a goth funeral march, folds itself out into a simply gorgeous cascade of clattering electronic drum sounds, bell-like synths and Vallesteros’ strangely absent vocals.

“When you rise from the dead/I’ll love you again”, he sings on the morbidly upbeat ‘Your Tomb’, and by then we know that he is a man that appreciates the darker aspects of falling in love – the inevitable end of the first infatuation, the struggle for independence, and the emotionally exhausting break-up-and-make-up-again phase.

None of his songs sound contrived, and the bone-dry production leaves a lot of breathing space for the synth dashes that are the freckles on this shy grin of an album. Only a dead-inside cynic will fail to smile back.

Scandinavian Crush by CraftSpells