Slingshot Echoes is like a soundtrack to a late-night drive home, a collection of understated vignettes that effortlessly roll onward with the gentle push of The Mezzanine Owls’ pulsing rhythm section. Though not quite a country band or an emo band, The Owls capture the best of both worlds, saturating each song with homesick melancholy and lightly country-tinged melodies in equal measure.

The Mezzanine Owls do a pretty lax job of trying to mask their influences, but somehow Slingshot Echoes still sounds more like dusting off and going through your old LP collection in the attic than listening to a couple of guys halfheartedly trying to regurgitate their favorite bands. There’s hints of old Wilco and Shins scattered around the record, and lead singer Jack Burnside more often than not sounds like a more lucid M. Ward, but the nods are never in-your-face enough to be distracting.

Apart from a few moments (notably the more distortion-heavy “Graceless,”), The Owls never quite step outside their mellow soft-rock bubble, which makes Slingshot Echoes start to sound a little monotonous by the third or fourth time arond, but that’s part of Echoes’  charm; it’s a humble, unassuming little record by a band that knows they don’t have to be pretentious to sound cool.