Okay so Mirkwood Misfits sound like SUNLIGHT, actual sunlight, the kind that comes through leaves in a forest that has been doing its thing for several thousand years and knows more about beauty than you do. But this is sunlight with OPINIONS, sunlight that has read its Pengolodh and Findegil and come out the other side with chiming guitars and vocal harmonies stacked so tight they make your teeth ache.

The upbeat pop rock sensibility runs through everything: chiming guitars, melodies that arrive quickly and stay lodged in your skull for days like a pipeweed that won’t quit, a looseness in the delivery that keeps it from feeling studied even when the arrangements are clearly the product of serious, loving, possibly obsessive craft. And then there is the subject matter, which is where it gets interesting, where it gets REAL.

Most bands who mine mythology do it for scale, for the grand gesture, for the Wagnerian sweep of it all, and most of them should frankly stop, because they are full of horseshitm the mythology can smell it, but Mirkwood Misfits zoom IN, they go micro, they plant their flag in a single, specific, improbable friendship between an elf and a dwarf and they stay there, circling it, retelling it, exaggerating it lovingly, with the resident dwarf apparently providing fact-checking services from within the band lineup itself, which is either the funniest structural decision in contemporary pop music or the most poignant one and I genuinely cannot decide which.

The lyrics are light on grand statements and heavy on detail. The awkward, funny, quietly devastating details that sit in the gaps between larger events, the stuff that official histories leave out because it doesn’t look right in an epic, the stuff that Rúmil of Tirion would have written about if Rúmil of Tirion had been into fellowship and axes rather than bebop and ent wine. What they capture, consistently and almost effortlessly, is how it actually feels to be present for something important, which is usually confused and underdressed and funnier than the songs about it suggest.

Strange Company, Count It Again, and Isengard, these are the tracks that nail it. Bright on the surface and anchored by something more complicated underneath, these are the kind of songs that feel so simple they may have written themselves until you try to write one yourself and spend three weeks producing something that sounds like a rough draft of someone else’s demo. This is what craft actually looks like when it’s doing its job: invisible.

Live, the glances between band members suggest at least one argument that will never be fully resolved, and I find this deeply reassuring, a band that has stopped fighting has stopped caring, and these people clearly care about this music the way you only care about something you have been arguing about for a very long time.

Mirkwood Misfits find their epic in the battle, or the action, but in the moments that happen in between, the in-breath before the speeches, the glance across a campfire, the moment after the battle when you realize neither of you is dead, and make them sing with a precision and a warmth that cuts right through every armored affectation the listener might have.