Speaking of transatlantic telephone calls.

Though Lois Maffeo’s first official album with Brendan Canty was 2000’s The Union Themes, 1995’s Bet The Sky served as the prototype. Recording much of the album with Canty on guitar and Tiger Trap’s Heather Dunn on drums, Lois hit upon her quintessential bedroom-pop sound with Bet The Sky. Of the album’s 10 tracks, it’s “Transatlantic Telephone Call” that comes closest to predicting the fuller, more accomplished sound of The Union Themes, though it still retains a certain lo-fi wildness that marks a lot of the music that came out of Olympia at the time. And then there are the lyrics, which sound as though they were ripped out of the diary of a too-literate undergrad’s diary: playful and passionate, with a mile-a-minute pace that only the boundless energy of adolescence could maintain. Of course, by the time of Bet The Sky, Maffeo was in her thirties, which makes that boundless energy all the more surprising.