The Fat Angel Sings

If Flannery O’Connor fronted the Replacements: Sharply observed short stories set to incisive, insistent guitar music if you love bands like Waxahatchee, Eighties R.E.M., Neutral Milk Hotel these could be your next favourite new band,  In the album’s knockout opener, “The Knock,” the narrator wakes up to find Jehovah’s Witnesses at her door.

This Philly crew signed to the venerable indie label Saddle Creek last year, right around the time singer Frances Quinlan duetted with Rivers Cuomo at a Weezer gig; and this spring, Hop Along opened for the War on Drugs on tour. But their second LP, “Painted Shut” voted one of Rolling Stone Magazine 45 Best Albums of 2015 So Far  reveals a band that should be headlining. Over 10 songs, vocalist Francis Quinlan sketches out bracingly vivid characters. The heartbreaking “Horseshoe Crabs” imagines the inner life of the late, troubled Sixties singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. The album’s emotional centerpiece, “Powerful Man,” recounts an experience in which the singer witnessed a man beating his child in public and felt powerless to stop it. “It’s not a hero’s story,” she says. “I wanted it to be about how horrible that was, and how I was a part of it by not doing something.” Another standout track, “Happy to See Me,” finds strange poetry in the image of a lonely father posting to YouTube at 4 a.m. “That’s based on a real person,” Quinlan says. “This was back when everyone was freaking out about 2012 and how everything was going to end. This man was routinely posting these videos, and there’d be a lit candle behind him, and he’d go into his spiritual revelations. I got really into watching those.”