There are few debut albums as cunningly able as Posies and Teeth. At a time when new releases seem to all be doing parodies of one another, Colin J. Nelson cuts through the cloud with daringly acute potency. A USC music student transplanted to Seattle in 2006, Nelson is a musician’s musician… fearless, yet fiercely precise. Delivering pop, folk and rock all in one coherent package, he is very nearly creating a genre all his own. “I try to think of the thing I want to hear that I couldn’t pick anything out of my record collection,” he says. “The one thing that I don’t know where to go to scratch that itch, rather than try and re-engineer music I think other people seem to want to hear….” It’s delightfully difficult to make outright comparisons of this album to that of any other artist. In terms of his influences, Nelson says he appreciates “general things they are doing, rather than a specific sound or style.” That said, generally speaking, one could be inclined to hear glimmers of Elliott Smith, Andrew Bird, and Beck at times in Posies and Teeth, but always shuffled within the landscape of a clearly original vision.