Let’s forego the obvious comparisons: Emmett Kelly’s compositions here clearly lean toward all of the obvious “the”s: The Byrds, The Beatles, The Cure. Putting this aside, the songwriter has a clear sense of his own vision on Goes Missing. On this most recent outing with The Cairo Gang, we chart a course for parts both familiar and distant – a landscape where all of the familiar 60s, jangly landscapes are ever present as a distant mirage, a horizon which we lean toward. Still, as Kelley exclaims on the second track, the listener is bound to “find [themselves] in stranger places.”

When Kelley sings “I’m tired of all the jive / Try not to think of the neighbors” (on “Gangsters Holding Hnads”) it almost seems like a central, thematic cry of Goes Missing. The Cairo Gang calls in all of its expansive thematic influences on this album—the psych folk, the jangle pop, the sound of the mid-’60s British rock invasion—to alchemize something cohesive and yet above all of these singular influences. The result nearly bursts at its seams: songs like “She Don’t Want You” and “Ice Fishing” almost burst within the near-perfect package of their presentation. The songs on Goes Missing elicit some otherworldliness that is instantly recognizable in their ephemeral nature, a comfortable strangeness as in the angular hooks of set closer “So What? Who Cares?” where the twelve-string twang is all 1960s psych & 1980s resignation, and yet completely in the moment in 2015.

With Goes Missing, The Cairo Gang has produced a batch of tunes whose catchiness is incredibly strong, and indeed whose songs could be played anywhere, anytime: its contents could be Top 40 material in 1966, and in 2015 it is nothing less than completely charming and irresistible.