Catchy pop-rock quartet Pomegranates are one such group. They released their debut full-length, Everything Is Alive, in April 2008 and have followed twelve months later with the excitedly titled Everybody, Come Outside!. That first record was scrappy and scruffy, like a somewhat twee take on an old Superchunk LP. On their new album, Pomegranates maintain most of their infectious energy, while buffing a nice shine onto their indie rock jalopy.

The disc opens with the title cut, a delirious ditty that is a manic yang to Arcade Fire's depressive yin. With its insistent fervor, "Everybody, Come Outside!" is perhaps the album's best cut. Not that the remaining ten are letdowns, mind you. "This Land Used To Be My Land, But Now I Hate This Land" twists Woody Guthrie's classic song title in a manner that might seem cynical, but the sentiment is easy to understand these days. The song is a dreamy little beauty, recalling the C86 UK indie pop movement of two decades past, but with just enough Midwestern, recession-era venom in Joey Cook's high tenor to keep the tune from drifting away. Another major highlight here is "Southern Ocean," a verging-on-power-pop track that also works in some wonderfully paranoid guitar lines and an odd middle section that brims with tightly wound melodrama. It's this kind of extra attention paid to song arrangement that raises Everybody, Come Outside! just above the middle ground.

That, and intriguing track titles like "Svaatzi Uutsi." Though its meaning is unclear, the handclaps and African highlife-like guitar melodies are sunny and propulsive, so who cares what the low-mixed and dubby vocals are trying to say. It might be about a dog? The brief and slow-core "384 BC" seems to be a tale of traveling back to the birth year of Aristotle and concluding (as Brian Wilson did in 1966): "I wasn't made for these times." The group then stretch themselves out on the nearly six-minute "Jerusalem Had a Bad Day," a winsome mixture of chiming French Kicks pastoral haze and, well, more Arcade Fire.

So, Pomegranates aren't a startlingly original band, but they do coalesce their influences into their own style. Throughout Everybody, Come Outside!, the band show equal interest in rhythm, texture, hooks, atmosphere, and melody. If they could consistently concentrate on more than a couple of these elements at once, Pomegranates would be a great band. They're still quite good, though, and this album proves they've grown considerably over the course of just one year. Enjoyable as is – and showing great promise – Everybody, Come Outside! is am imperative worth heeding.

Recommended Tracks: "Everybody, Come Outside!" "Southern Ocean," "This Land Used To Be My Land, But Now I Hate This Land"

-Michael Keefe