he Incredibly Shrinking Cover Art: It’s a digital music era phenomena frequently dissected in print and cyberspace under clever banners such as “Run For Cover!” Pundits grind that there was a time when album cover art contextualized the very music it packaged. Seeing Orleans’ Waking and Dreaming reduced to media player proportions is good and righteous, but having to squint to savor the postmodern appropriation of a Peter Saville or the cartoonish savagery of a Derek Riggs…well, that’s when 10K-jpeg miniaturization is deemed unacceptable.

So am I antiquated for feeling compelled to agree? Let’s face it: Stacks of tiny, yellow folder icons can’t compete with reveling in the “gloriously parasitic elements of graphic design,” to quote Saville. Or, on a more visceral gnarly level, blanching at a coffin-bursting Eddie claw at the jugular of a gravedigger.

The cover art for the Pines’ latest release, the pop-folk compilation It’s Been a While, is in line with the stock-photography nostalgia of Matinée Recordings’ countless singles: a cold-hued portrait of a holiday lodge. And when American Pam Berry’s soaring, alpine vocals open “Milk Bar,” the album cover quickly transforms from knife blue / blinding white ornament to narrative backdrop: lodge-goers stopped in their tracks, eyes cast towards the snowy scalp of a nearby peak, Berry’s voice echoing down with frolic or crushing pang—potent imagery certainly lost if this was Lilliputian-sized artwork.

In “Chalet,” our mountain siren grapples with craggy solitude (“Read the old newspapers from last year / I think I’ll go outside today / And throw them on a fire / To leave the world a signal that I’m here”), and her soul’s matter and merit. Through it all, Berry is granite-like in strength, her voice concealing the heartache swelling inside. Much of the track’s pathos comes from the notable absence of the other half of the Pines: English vocalist / guitarist Joe Brooker, who plays the romantic foil on It’s Been a While to perfection. When Berry sings, “Must I find a way / In the forests of the night / While all of you are lighting up the town?,” one imagines her staring down wistfully from her perch at the golden-squared taproom that swallowed her wassailing love.

Berry’s isolated vocals also twinkle on the heavy-hearted “Static” and the cover of the Cat’s Miaow’s “Aurora,” but equally appealing are the lighthearted duets with Brooker. Their voices are diametric opposites—hers captivating, transcendent; his pure, earthy in tone. Together, they occupy a realm where doves and dirt willfully bed. On tracks such as “Forget-Me-Nots,” their harmonies give the song an ephemeral quality—a lovers’ trail of side-by-side, footprints disappearing under a blanket of fresh snow. When not crooning, Brooker drives the album with his acoustic playing, blending drowsy chords with sharp, finger-picked melodies. And his electric guitar, harmonica, and accordion parts are sparse, leaving an intimacy reminiscent of labelmates Lovejoy or contemporaries Hobotalk.

Couplets such as, “Forget you ever saw me / And go back to baking your bread,” also reveal the duo’s penchant for domestic, bedsit pop. The self-absorption is never dull, however, thanks to all the spit and spark in the relationship. In “MGM,” Berry sings, “Each time we argue I notice your tongue getting sharper,” which prompts Brooker to respond with a pinking pinch of his own: “I always said that you put me in mind of a movie star / I never said which one.” The dishy barbs continue on “Marie Claire,” where the pair tiff over past divergences in their relationship (a snotty Brooker: “Maybe you never should have taken that job at the BBC / I always called it a company / You insisted it was a corporation”), and on the Byrds-influenced “Please Don’t Get Married (Without Asking Me),” devilishly equating matrimony with madness.

Brooker and Berry have long been contributors in the indie-pop world—he with the English pop band the Foxgloves; she with acts such as Black Tambourine, as well as her founding role with Chickfactor—but neither has recorded anything as eternally inviting as the singles, compilation appearances, and unreleased tracks assembled here on It’s Been a While.