Pussycat a poetic effort

"Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl/How charmingly sweet you sing!/Oh! let us be married/too long we have tarried/But what shall we do for a ring?'" Edward Lear wrote that back in 1871 in his bedtime-classic Owl & the Pussycat, and the band Owl & the Pussycat is just about as pleasant as the book. A duo consisting of Greg Moore and Lois Maffeo from Olympia, Wash., they reflect the ex-hippie-beatnik-hipster side of indie pop. Like the similar minded Elliott Smith, they play with the conventions of standard pop-rock via folk. Coming off like Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe," as done by slow-core figureheads Low, Owl & the Pussycat is a charming effort. Though such gentle reflections and self-reflexiveness can often become tiresome, Maffeo and Moore's shared vocal duties carry the album on love -- the kind of love that shuts out a world of calamities by the simple virtue that two lovebirds just don't care about anything else. There's room in this world for all sorts of variations on this story. As learned from Bachelard's Poetics of Space, everyone's got a unique house of their imagination.