By Johnny Ray Huston

ONE YEAR AGO I wrote that the Aislers Set's 1998 debut album contained pop songs that gradually reveal nuances and quirks of character. Today, listening to Terrible Things Happen for the 432d time (just kidding – I haven't kept count), I second that emotion: at first I liked the album, then I loved it, and now, two years into the relationship, marriage isn't out of the question – I still feel like I'm far from having discovered everything within its personal yet expansive world.

Released on the small East Bay label Slumberland, Terrible Things Happen has gradually amassed the widespread cult following it deserves. Members of Belle and Sebastian, and the Pastels – Glasgow bands that Set leader Amy Linton is a fan of – are now fans of hers. It's hard to win the respect of the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merrit (when he isn't writing and recording, he's currently the most scathing pop critic on the planet), but when his band toured last fall, Terrible Things Happen floated from the Great American Music Hall's speakers before their S.F. show. And when they returned this spring, the Aislers Set themselves – singer-guitarist-producer Amy Linton, guitarist-vocalist Wyatt Cusick, bassist Alicia VandenHevvel, organist Jen Cohen, and drummer Yoshi Nakamoto – graced the stage before them.

In June the Aislers Set release their second album. The Last Match is a more up-tempo but not necessarily more upbeat collection. "Hit the Snow" chimes like a Phil Spector Christmas recording. "Balloon Song" evokes the great, obscure '80s girl-garage group Dolly Mixture. Cusick's "Lonely Side of Town" is a vaudevillian rags-to-riches-to-breakup tale. "The Way to Market Station" opens the album with a reverb-laden guitar sound that's both classic and classically Aislers Set; after a seemingly sunny vocal laced with disturbing images ("I'm frightened of the cancer on their faces"), the song's vast sound is stripped down to a rhythm dominated by the sound of one person clapping.

When I meet Amy Linton for an interview, it's at Sadie's Flying Elephant, a Potrero Hill bar. Linton is dogsitting Aggi, a small blond labrador retriever, and Aggi is nervous. Otherwise, the setting seems apt; as I press Record, the Jam are blaring from the jukebox. But one too many drunken interruptions soon force the three of us out of the bar and into a van, with Linton's apartment our destination. Once we arrive, she puts on an album – Orange Juice's You Can't Hide Your Love Forever – from her library of vinyl (no CDs), and I toss a tennis ball for Aggi to fetch.

I ask Linton when she began playing music. "I started [with] drums in the sixth grade," she says, her voice a lowercase version of the drowsy, conversationally melodic vocals on her records. "My friend Michael and I were in a band, and we did "Crazy Train" and an original for elementary school assembly. Then I started a little new wave band in junior high, and a punk band with my brother when I was twelve." In high school Linton formed yet another band, with her friend Matt Hartman: Henry's Dress, a My Bloody Valentine-meets-Mod trio that went on to record two albums for Slumberland – that is, after Linton sent a demo to owner Mike Schulman, then traveled from her hometown of Albuquerque, N.M., to Berkeley to see a show at Mod Lang, the Britpop store where Schulman worked at the time.

If Schulman has an enthusiasm for all kinds of music (he's a pop and jazz devotee who put out Stereolab's first U.S. album, and who founded the East Bay's first drum 'n' bass store/label, Drop Beat), his love of music is matched only by his dislike of vanity trends and industry foibles. At this point, the Aislers Set are virtually the only band whose records he will happily endorse. "He's turned away stuff that would sell," Linton agrees. "If he doesn't like it he's not going to put it out, which is probably why he doesn't put out very many records. I respect his opinion a lot, and it makes me feel better about what I'm doing."

What Linton did in 1997 was forge out on her own. Or more precisely, she went into her garage with her guitar, drums, an Otari eight-track, and two mics borrowed from a roommate, and began writing and recording songs. She hit paydirt the very first time: "Alicia's Song" (included on Terrible Things Happen) is a slow swoon of a song that sounds like the Paris Sisters in a cathedral lit by stars, not a solitary songwriter in a carpet-covered 10-by-12 room. Over a three-month period, Linton went on to record nine more songs by herself. None sound like they were made on an eight-track, and most sound like a full band. "Friends of the Heroes," featuring floor-tom and tambourine percussion and guitars that motor like the Shangri-Las' and Shop Assistants' "Train from Kansas City," is a typical(ly great) example: as Linton lists off the digits of a loverlorn long-distance phone call, she lets go of harmonies that double as hopes, and they float up, up, and away.

Throughout Terrible Things Happen, Linton uses the studio expressively, as another instrument. The heart of the album is "Mary's Song," a seven-minute ballad that is one of four group recordings. Breaths and whispers and the jangle of keys can be heard in the faraway distance; as Linton sings a detailed first-person narrative about visiting Portland, falling in love, then returning home alone, the music follows her every step. The journey has many twists and turns; though one review of the album compares Linton's voice to that of the Shirelles' Shirley Owens Alston, her phrasing is as idiosyncratic and characterful as her lyrics.

If The Last Match's character could be reduced to a single sound, it would be a vintage pop one: "La la la." Linton spikes (variations of) that nonsense phrase with dark meaning. "I split up in two / One half la-la-la-la-la-la-laughing," she repeatedly sings before a Byrdsian outtro sweeps "One Half Laughing" into silence. A portrait of a kid whose filthy mind hides his/her sentimental side, "The Walk" finds Linton stretching the word "light" until it has four, and sometimes eight, syllables. The stately title track steps outside a relationship to view it with quizzical compassion:

Your li-i-i-i-i-i-i-ies

In my li-i-i-i-i-i-i-ies

What pretty little things we are

The Aislers Set are a Bay Area indie supergroup of sorts – Cusick is in Track Star, VandenHevvel is in Poundsign; Nakamoto is in Scenic Vermont, and Cohen is in the Fairways (all of whom have albums due later this year) – and The Last Match is a more collaborative work than Terrible Things Happen. Linton is still adjusting to the change. "Everyone had an idea of what things should sound like," she says, taking Orange Juice off the turntable and putting Felt (an '80s band on the Creation label) on. "I'm still having trouble with this next one. It could always be better, which is just so bad." I mention that she seemed equally uneasy when Terrible Things Happen was finished: "Documentation is so important, and I don't want to put out a bad record. I'm scared of a song being ill-represented because it wasn't recorded properly, because that's the way it's going to be remembered, if it is remembered."

One song that definitely will be remembered is "Bang Bang Bang": closing the album, its piano and horn section arrangement is as poignant as Brian Wilson's loneliest pet sounds. In the Aislers Set story, paths of fandom are as important as paths of musicianship, so it should come as no surprise that when Linton was a kid she loved the Beach Boys. Her mom loved Tamla/Motown, the Marvelettes, the Ronettes, and the Chiffons (she now has her mom's 45 collection). "Every Easter, for as many years as they used to put out records, my Mom used to give me a Go-Go's record," she says. "I guess it was kind of hard to be into pop music growing up in Albuquerque – no one was trying to sell it to me. When I bought my first Smiths record, that was a big step."

"The only way to find out anything was if one of your friends went to England." she remembers. "Some girl brought back this magazine that stereotyped every type of kid in England at the time – the bubblegum pop kids, the Goths, the crusty punks. And it said, 'If you like the Smiths, you'll probably like Talulah Gosh and the Pastels.' Then I took this trip with my brother to Colorado. We went to Wax Trax, and they had all that stuff, so I bought it, brought it back, and I thought it was terrible. I didn't think the Pastels sounded anything like the Smiths. But the senior year in high school I came around."

Linton has fallen for psychedelia, Free Design-style easy listening, and international garage rock (faves: Los Bravos and Les Sultans), to name just three, but her passion for Brit- and Scot-pop remains. "I love Television Personalities," she says, as if confessing a secret crush, when I mention that a friend has noticed connections between that group, Belle and Sebastian, and the Aislers Set. Then she changes her tone: "Some radio guy recently asked me, 'How do you feel about all these San Francisco indie poppers wearing their musical influences on their sleeves.' I was really proud of myself – I just told him that [influences are] something to be proud of, especially if they mean that much to you. If they didn't point out their own influences, he'd probably do it for them."

"I just met this guy Alistair Fitchett," she continues. "He's a high school teacher who wrote a personal account of growing up listening to pop music [Young and Foolish: A Personal Pop Odyssey]. We were trying to draw all these parallels between art and music. Just because there's so much more music and it's so much more available, it's also more disposable and taken for granted – the amount of time in making a record isn't even considered. He was saying that regardless of influences and sounds a listener has to understand that I've been making music since I was twelve, and it basically took me fifteen years to make that record [The Last Match]. I think that's not considered."

The Aislers Set's music takes journeys: on The Last Match, Cusick's theatrically fey "Chicago New York" is a sequel-of-sorts to "London Madrid," a desultory travel diary by Linton on the first album. But the group is a new addition to the tradition of great California bands, contrasting a romantic's drunken dreams ("I want to kiss you every mile of the West Coast," Linton sings midway through "Mary's Song") with hungover realities. Another seemingly sunny song, titled "California" presents the latter with heartbreaking directness:

I read it in a magazine, they said it's all for free

Stop your daydreaming about such silly little things

'Cause California lies.

"My life just happens to involve this city I guess," Linton says, when asked how San Francisco's landscape has influenced her songwriting. While true, that answer, delivered with a shrug, doesn't convey the degree to which the Aislers Set's songs present a portrait of this city: a vision of San Francisco as a place where art-loving misfits can still bond together to form imperfect, ill-defined but supportive – for lack of a better word – families. Linton's song titles ("Army Street"; "Mary's Song"; "Jaime's Song"), lyrics (which refer to buildings, streets, walls, doors, and floors) and most of all her producer's sense of space create a place inhabited by people. A great, flawed place inhabited by great, flawed people.

The intricate pencil-drawn cover art of Terrible Things Happen, made by Linton, details part of a bridge-like structure. The Last Match is dressed in a colorful painting (again by Linton) of tilted buildings. By day Linton works at an architectural business, and she recently designed her first house "from the ground up" for a client. At the end of the interview, I ask what her ideal structure would be. The answer she gives, however modest and vague, could double as a description of her music. "I definitely like open spaces that open onto other, larger open spaces. But I also like the cosiness of my room. I'm finding that light is the most important thing. I don't want to say it would look all '60s [Laughs] ... but it probably would."

The Last Match will be released by Slumberland Records June 12.

PICTURED: AMY LINTON

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