It’s been a while since Pandora went black to anyone outside the United States due to copyright concerns—a relatively new trend, enforcing copyright by reintroducing national borders to the internet—so even though they continue to send me e-mail, I haven’t actually been able to listen to their service in a very long time. This is mainly due to my laziness in setting up access to an American proxy (take that, RIAA!) so don’t worry about sending me tips on how to get around the geographical block.

In any case, even from when I was listening to Pandora, I’d found a number of songs worth holding on to. Whereas a couple of years ago I’d have to just wait for the radio DJ to ID the song and write down whatever I heard (The Dismemberment Planet, anyone?), now it was relatively easy to look up a band and find their music within seconds of hearing the first notes of their song. Alas, with 142 songs from two months of Pandora patronage, finding out what you want to research is harder than it sounds. But Consonant was always near the top of the list, on the basis of one song with a quirky name and chorus: “John Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’.”

Turns out the Boston band has a fair amount of back story. Clint Conley, the man behind Consonant’s curtain, just so happens to be the bassist for legendary Boston post-punk band Mission of Burma. I’ve heard of the band but never their music; this is not surprising, since the band broke up about a year after I was born. It also means I’ve missed out on decades worth of anticipation of side projects and solo careers. Anyone who was waiting for Conley to resurface after the band dissolved waited a long time: Consonant was Conley’s first major music project since Mission of Burma, leaving nothing but a nineteen-year period of mostly silence. (Take that, Kevin Shields fans.)

Interesting, then, that “John Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’” should sound very much like a product of 2002—it’s pretty straightforward melodic indie rock, the kind of thing that wouldn’t sound out of place on the college rock charts just before the likes of Interpol and Bloc Party made it big. My favorite thing about the song has to be the chorus, where Conley manages to juggle words and syllables that don’t sound as though they ought to fit with the music at all, but end up finding proper homes in the nooks and crannies of the slightly unorthodox chord progressions. It’s more fun to sing along to than your usual chorus, with the words threatening to trip over each other at any moment.

Consonant released another album in 2003, Love and Affection, but in 2004 Mission of Burma became a semi-ongoing concern once more, and have released two albums in that time. The corresponding lack of Consonant material implies Conley has other things on his mind these days. Perhaps it’s just as well, as shortly after Consonant shifted to harder material in 2003, the entire “melodic indie rock” thing fell apart entirely, to be replaced by the corporate indie rock landscape of the present day.