loistered like eremites and warmed with nothing but their own creative fires, songwriters J. Alexander Farrill and Timothy Miles Bean used charms and chants to evoke the specter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Well, he rapped on their cabin door all right, fresh from a wispy, wilderness hopscotch—traipsing through snow puddles, smelling the pine and cedar, bathing in the purple light of rich fancy—and remained long enough to get his boot slush and fingernail dirt are all over The Shot Heard ‘Round the World’s pop-meets-folk debut, Ten Songs for Town and Country.

Like Emerson, the Brooklyn-based TSHRTW (their moniker inspired by his “Concord Hymn”) chronicle nature’s expressions, its ephemeral essence, its ability to be tricked in holiday attire one moment, overspread with melancholy the next. Ten Songs for Town and Country stands bare-footed outside our windows of diligence, mocking us while it revels in Nature’s pomp of emerald and auburn. It’s seasonal in its variance: possessing the haphazard assemblage of a stone cairn, the brisk exhilaration of a dip in a kettle lake, the energy of a bough-swaying storm. Of course, key in capturing all these elements was Farrill and Bean isolating themselves as much from chambers, as from community (“In the woods too, a man casts off his years,” Emerson once penned, “In the woods, we return to reason and faith . . .”), the pair knapsacking their way to bucolic Wilmington, Vermont, bunking in a Thoreau-like cabin, recording in a local establishment known as the Indigo Lounge.

The catchy triptych “Town & Country” is the album’s apex, opening with a wistful, mist-veiled melody before giving way to tumbledown guitar, tenderfoot harmonies, bits of clarinet, and colorful, naturalistic imagery: “a season full of bee stings,” “snowflakes on the ocean.” A sloppy guitar solo, notes lying broken and in heaps, and then: in keeping with the thematic chorus (“And the day is passing on”), a humble final act rimed with violin, which has the listener pulling up a wicker chair for that impending sunset.

The minimal “Harvest Breed” and “The Torn Byrd” reconnoiter these same peaks and valleys, calling to mind the hushed work of Band of Horses and fellow Brooklynites the Essex Green, but TSHRTW also exhibit a willow’s flexure, conveying similar emotion in their more frenzied, ramshackle works. “Lentin” is a hailstorm of earthy vocals, folksy guitars, and mood swings that manically recall the Unicorns; “Mtn. Song (for M-Howell)” features one-key piano brio, a nervy yet melodic bassline, and words that read like the cave wall poetry of a craggy, wolf pelt-clad mountain man: “Girl, girl don’t do me wrong / You’re a rock and I’m a fawn / Heart of forest, never-ending / Crystal mountain, river bending.”

The jazzy “Inward to Lexington” is nourished on nature’s temporal colors, its pricks of bramble guitar and ripe trombone coming and going like buzzing flies on carrion. “Cassiopeia” is similarly inspired: fleeting glockenspiel and handclaps, then an astral, guitar-and-piano coda evoking the glittery vault of the heavens before dazzlingly burning out.

Taking a breather from the ambitious, Of Montreal-inspired instrumentation, Farrill and Bean employ a simple effect (feedback) in producing the album’s most visceral track, “Dead on Night.” The feedback snarls like a rabid gray wolf, lurks in the background, ready to pounce on lines like “You’re the one thing I need / Because my heart is full of pumpkin seeds,” then abruptly flees. Peril averted, the listener maintains a jittery calm, before the album’s meadow pensiveness swallows him up again.

“Standing on the bare ground,” our man Emerson wrote, “my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes.” Ten Songs for Town and Country is this pronouncement committed to couplet and cadence: errors honored as hidden intentions, jackleg hymns from a pair of druids trying their darndest to deify nature.