Every so often, circumstance tosses you an album that reminds you how refreshing and nourishing a collection of songs can be. Nice is just such an album. Chad Crouch's latest project, Blanket, is so effortlessly hearty and rich you might think a stout, smiley-eyed elderly woman with a kerchief on her head and a husky Slavic accent ought to be serving it to you in heavy earthenware. Only there's an airy sophistication to it that begs for a more upscale food metaphor.

Of course, you're obliged to start with the great vocals. If Crouch's voice were but one food item within the larger, guilt-ridden multi-course indulgence that is Blanket's Nice, you might say that it's a soup (prepared by Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch, then spat into by the Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano) to open the meal and prime the palette for the eclectic parade of delicacies to come, while setting an easy tone for a long night of postprandial conversation.

Nice is Chad Crouch's first album released under the Blanket moniker and finds him newly and comfortably entrenched in a band setting. It suits him very well. Crouch, a painter, Portland music fixture, and head of Hush Records, is best known for his fine solo album, Portland, Oregon. While his songwriting skills were quite evident before, Blanket seems to have given Crouch a more spacious and better equipped stage on which to let his ideas play themselves out.

For starters, he utilizes a wonderful spectrum of sounds. Flute, organ, violin, vibes, piano, and accordion are all strung seamlessly and inconspicuously like dyed wool strands onto a sturdy loom of bass, guitar and drums. Another "sound" Crouch uses to great effect is silence-- the silence between the various timbres of the instruments, the spaces between notes, and the quietness spaced throughout his expertly phrased and timed vocal melodies. The immediate impression is one of sparseness and underdeveloped arrangement, but as the album progresses, you'll notice how much more suggestive the sounds become from all the spare room.

The songs on Nice encompass disparate style elements but never feel contrived or borrowed. From the loungy percussion of "Déjà Vu" that sets the album in motion to the folk-cum-bossa-nova of "Bossa Rev," the songs never lose sight of their prime directive. Which, of course, is the execution of contemplative, enduring, and sometimes even haunting pop gems. One obvious example of this is the way "Bossa Rev" adorns an Antonio Jobim-esque melody and rhythm with a Western-style blues slide guitar solo, yet does it so naturally that questions of style aren't allowed to impinge on the listening experience.

Though I'd be hard pressed to whittle this bunch down to a best-of list, definite standouts include the beautifully mournful, vibraphone-jeweled "Kitten"; the spritely, euro-jazzy insouciance of "Déjà Vu"; the wispy "Cliché Lines"; the sauntering "Sexy Ways"; and the imagistic, organ-laced "Pigeon."

A funny thing about this album. The reason it sounds so much like a live band is precisely because the individual songs were basically recorded live. As a result of that immediacy, as well as the loungy feel of many of these songs, the natural tendency while listening to Nice is to drift off in thought or take up an unrelated activity. Though the music makes for truly wonderful background, and could cast a soft, soothing light over any scenario, sitting down for an attentive ride through this album is a wholly different experience. For all its airiness, occasional bounciness, and live performance feel, Nice makes a remarkably intense and enduring listen. So much so, in fact, that I'll hold off making some idiotic pun with the word "nice," and just exhort you to find a copy.

-Camilo Arturo Leslie