I want to be completely superficial for a moment and throw up a Recommended If You Like or two. If you like Bright Eyes, you will like Nana Grizol. If you like Okkervil River, you will like Nana Grizol. If you like both? You will adore Love It Love It, but it is for all the ways in which Nana Grizol are different that you will really fall in love.

At times, it is downright eerie how similar Nana Grizol is to Bright Eyes. On “Less Than Air” especially, a cursory listen could easily trick a Bright Eyes fan into thinking they have stumbled upon an Conor Oberst B-side. The music is reminiscent of some of the more upbeat tracks on Lifted, but the real clincher is singer Theo Hilton’s voice: he has that raspy melancholy of cigarettes and red wine down to a T.

Thankfully, Nana Grizol do more than copy the gritty folk rocksters that have come before. Opener “Circles ‘Round The Moon”, “Tamborine-N-Thyme” (mentioned previously), and “The Idea That Everything Could Possibly Ever Be Said” (the list goes on) all manage to eschew any templates, effortlessly pushing and pulling the band between folk and punk and pop. Through all of it, Nana Grizol maintains a very light sound, helped by the periodic xylophone hits and use of horns (thanks to Neutral Milk Hotel alums Laura Carter and Robbie Cucchiaro).

The strength of this debut album may be surprising, but the sound is nothing less than fitting with the band’s upbringing: raised on a cross-country tour of DIY venues and nurtured by 150 acres of open land (members of Nana Grizol and Elf Power own the record label, Orange Twin, which runs an eco-village for artists in Athens, Georgia). Love It Love It is eleven tracks to listen to as the crickets call and the fire crackles, or the wind blows over the tall grass and through your hair, or the walls swell as 100 friends-to-be squeeze into a basement to listen to Theo Hilton sing.

Given the band’s chemical makeup (two parts Neutral Milk Hotel) and familiar sound (is that Conor Oberst singing?), it would be easy for Nana Grizol to veer off course into the land of cookie-cutter indie rock. But for right now, with Love It Love It, Nana Grizol is striking out on their own. Hopefully they will continue reinventing their sound, staying far away from the beaten path.

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