Keath Mead: Sunday Dinner – delightful if you don’t mind sweetness

The debut album from 25-year-old South Carolinian Keath Mead, released on Toro Y Moi’s label, likely won’t dazzle at first listen, but it quietly seeps into one’s consciousness, by virtue of old-fashioned merits: songcraft and melodies. In a sentence, you could say it’s Teenage Fanclub if they’d formed in the post-chillwave, post-electronica age. It’s pretty consistently sunny guitar pop, embellished with little washes of electronic sound by producer Chaz Bundick (Toro himself), but assembled so deliciously it’s hard to quibble. There are repeated ideas: the album standout, Polite Refusal, is all but a rather better rewrite of the preceding track, Navy. And those with a disdain for sweetness might find themselves reaching for the sick bag at times: “We can have a dozen children,” Mead sings on Where I Wanna Be, “As many as you please/ As long as they are like you/ And don’t take after me.” But if that poses you no problems, then there’s much about Sunday Dinner to delight.