Jennifer Gentle

Jennifer Gentle is not the girl next door. With one ear pressed to Donovan’s Greatest Hits and the other to Elephant 6, she produces giddy, psychedelic pop that comes from a parallel universe in which the Partridge Family dropped acid and joined the circus. Disappointingly, the girl next door never does that. Kazoos, glockenspiels, harmoniums — even a deflating-balloon solo — augment her off-kilter ditties. Most notably, though, Ms. Gentle is actually an all-male duo from Padova, Italy. On their American debut, Valende, Marco Fasolo and Alessio Gastaldello prove that their idiosyncratic take on psych pop cannot be contained by conventional instrumentation or orthodox songwriting. The record is stuffed with blissful toe-tappers, splatter paintings of noise, and dreamy twigs floating lazily downstream. You never know what you’ll get with Jennifer Gentle, but it’s always intriguing. Unlike the girl next door.