Ghosts roam freely on “Demersville,” the long-awaited album by local band John Weinland. Most of the time they appear as the specter of expired relationships, although the record’s quiet jewel, “Other Folks,” is actually a gentle and tender missive to a departed lover. These are songs that are truly haunting in their beauty — full of melancholy nostalgia and delivered in lovely, sepia-toned folk-pop snapshots. Singer Adam Shearer has the kind of breathy vocals and songwriting skills that have earned comparisons to Neil Young, Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. Those names get bandied about a lot, but in this case the name-checking is merited. “Demersville” is a rare bird — an album that announces itself as a classic from beginning to end. Piano, strings, pedal steel, dobro, mouth harp and some very lovely harmonies give the songs a dusty, dusky atmosphere that accentuates the bittersweet feeling of losing something that’s been dear. “Just because some things end, it doesn’t mean you’re not the world to me. Will I know you again?” Shearer sings in “The Loaded Gun.” In “Other Folks,” he reassures his departed that “I still don’t feel alone. I can feel your breath on the back of my neck, like a whisper from home.” Like the letters and photographs from former friends and lovers that litter the songs, Shearer seems to want to reassure us that those people never truly disappear. While their presence may be transitory, the effects are long-lasting — and so are the songs on “Demersville.” — Barbara Mitchell

[FOLK-POP] Adam Shearer, the lead singer of the band John Weinland, is one of the strongest young songwriters in this city. An acoustic strummer, Shearer is, in his whispered lyricism and his gift for imagery, an heir to Elliott Smith. He also shares that late songwriter's obsession with distance and an unattainable peace of mind, as heard on John Weinland's first official release, Demersville (self-released). But there is also a great divide between the songwriters. Here among the country-tinged arrangements and patient instrumental interludes, Shearer has managed to interweave his sad songs with something that rarely occurs in Smith's compositions: hope. "Other Folks," where Shearer musters a Neil Young drawl against Alia Farah tender harmonies, shows the beautiful complexity hope and despair can create when in the hands of Shearer. "I hope you don't regret a single day you spent/ draggin' my old heart around," he sings as the lap steel whines. The rest of the album covers the same ground with little musical repetition, from the "it's all in how you're layin' it out" of "The Loaded Gun" to the "I've got hope, but she's got reason" of "Young and Smart" to the—dammit, there's that word again—"I've got a little hope up in my heart" of "Scene 30." It's amazing what a talented backing band can do for music rooted in darkness. The other players on this album manage to paint Shearer's guarded hope with joy (the instrumentals on "The Letters" burst with it). But when hope is absent in Shearer's songs, the band becomes a burden. "Piles of Clothes" is the best song the Portlander has ever written. It's an earnest lament of an absent love filled with distance, doubt and indifference and led off with a telling image: "I'm sleepin' next to piles of clothes/ That I can't even manage to fold/ Clean or otherwise." It's a painful, miserable song, but it's hard to imagine that Shearer is really that miserable with the instrumentation here. Played with a full band, plus violin, cello and piano, this song of loneliness sounds almost like a pose. A song like this is meant to be played alone in a room cluttered with clothes, not musicians. Hopefully Shearer will realize that when the hope disappears, so should the band. —MARK BAUMGARTEN

Head over to our pod-n-vod page to check out my interview with local band John Weinland. Included with the interview are a few tracks off their new album Demersville, which quickly proved to be an amazing & intimate collection of hauntingly beautiful folk lullabies—the kind that are so good they give you goose bumps.