It can be a real chore, sometimes, having to listen to these sort of self-released, DIY CDs by completely anonymous bands, music you have to summon the will to write something at least readable about, because no-one else would. And truth be told, I only ended up with this because I managed to lose Dave Cloud’s Fever EP before I’d had a chance to listen to it. And so this slips out of a jiffy bag, a plastic CD-slipcase with photocopied artwork, with a band name that looks like the final letter has slipped off the side of the artwork. Apparently Piney Gir has been around for a while now, though her existence has entirely passed me by, and I was hardly expecting it to be a name that would stick in my head for long after I’d written up this review.But don’t you just love being able to admit your wrong, when it’s something like this? Sometimes the nicest thing is just to be surprised by something so innocuous that you barely realised what you were doing when you started doing it. "Hallo Halo" opens the album in glorious stereophony, a track that in a strange way seems to scream “mobile phone advert”, but in a charming way, the kind of advert that you like just because of the cutesy, twee pop song in the background. It’s a captivating way to start the record, if not one that really sets the tone for the rest of the album.Thematically, this is (though it feels derisive to say so) your common or garden “break-up album”. A glimpse at the track listing will reveal “Love is a Lonely Place”, “Weeping Machine” and “Say I’m Sorry”, titles whose melodrama betray nothing of the quirky breed of melancholy that the songs hold. That’s “quirky” in the good way, not in the Regina Spektor building houses out of macaroni way. And compared to the recent big-name “break-up album”, Noah & The Whale’s The First Days of Spring, this is an album that positively takes joy in heartache. While Fink’s chronicling of his own break-up oozes with an inflated sense of self-importance and the sound of him wallowing in a big bath of self-pity, Piney spits out lyrics like “be careful to who you pledge your undying love, when you throw it down is it a gauntlet or a glove?” with a willful abandon the Whale man would kill to achieve. Jaunty country duet "All The Wonderful Things" best displays the album’s playful nonchalance with the ubiquitous heartbreak theme, with it’s sarcastically-tinged refrain of “I’m so happy it’s you”, and petty domestic argument verses: “It started on a rainy day in May (was it November?) / The way you took that homely girl to Spain (no it was Germany!)”. And then Piney Gir just throws in something completely insane, like the campfire-singalong-esque "Blixa Bargeld’s Bicylce", which even ends in the kind of singing as a round I haven’t heard since we were forced to sing hymns in that style in primary school. A comparison would force me in the direction of Jenny Lewis’ Rabbit Fur Coat, but that’s probably doing a disservice to The Yearling, which despite being steeped in Americana and country, hides it’s influences remarkably well and sounds like little else you’re likely to hear in the mainstream around now.At fifty-one minutes and sixteen tracks, it’s slightly over-long, especially when the quality takes a significant dip towards the end, where nothing can quite match the joy of the first eight tracks or so. Nevertheless, it’s an album that makes all the random obscurities we get sent worth it, an album that, whatever else, simultaneously manages to be a great story of lost loves, while being the most fun album I’ve heard all year. Also, it contains the following lyric: “If language were liquid you’d be nothing but a tear.” I can’t resist that.Piney Gir on MySpace