1. The Texas Governor
“Sometimes I Feel Like”
from “The Experiment”
www.thetexasgovernor.com

The Texas Governor’s playful, outgoing, chaotic sound is much more interesting than the measured treadmilling of most indie bands, and their latest album, “The Experiment,” reveals that this modus operandi is growing bolder with age. Taut, edgy foot-stompers “1,2,3,4” and “Staring at the Movie Screen” sit side by side with skillfully textured quieter moments like “The Amazing Sleeping Alarm Clock” and the all-too-brief “Love Don’t Fade Away.” The track here is a mid-album highlight, playful with childlike naiveté balanced by musings on slightly darker topics. “They’re all songs about having your heart destroyed,” says front man Dave Goolkasian of the album, which was recorded last year. “I predict that the next record will just be extremely happy.”

A bag of contradictions, The Texas Governor can sound epic yet intimate, familiar yet fresh and vibrant, with Goolkasian’s quirky, quivering vocals giving warmth to the console glow of Casio and surges of guitar, with drums holding it all together. That Goolkasian fronts the band as someone who has seen it all before is no act, as he led ’90s ironic indie pop outfit The Elevator Drops to notable acclaim. Now, almost always playing somewhere in Dover, Portsmouth or Boston, he leads a live lineup that includes Mike “Sparky” Philips on Casio, Nick Phaneuf on guitar and a bearded, bespectacled, Animal-like drummer who goes simply by “Jim.”

“I want to be as great and as famous as possible,” Goolkasian says. “But I don’t want to do anything about it. I’m the worst music businessperson. I’m the worst at promoting my own career. But I kind of gave up on being a ‘musician.’ What I’m doing now is just from the heart. And I hope people find it, and I hope they enjoy it.”

It takes a special kind of genius to transform such simple stuff into something transcendentally great. In this sense, The Texas Governor are geniuses of goodwill, their sense of humanity piercing indie rock’s agnostic soul.