Jim Fairchild, the guitarist for beloved California band Grandaddy (now sadly broken up), has been keeping busy lately. He’s intimately involved with Dangerbird Records, and has produced records by Earlimart and (soon-to-be-loved) Dappled Cities. Seeing him onstage with any of those bands, Fairchild comes across as pleasant and unassuming—and big surprise, perfect characterization of his music right there. To get the rest of the bio stuff out of the way:  Ten Readings of a Warning is Fairchild’s first release under his solo nom de plume All Smiles; the (inevitable) guests on the album are surprisingly only percussionists, but from big-ticket indie bands like Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, and Menomena. And if you knew Grandaddy, and thought of Fairchild as only a guitarist, rest assured—his voice is smooth and blends so easily with his acoustic guitar or piano accompaniments you’d swear he’d been performing all his life.

This country pop is so understated that you might be forgiven in missing its point the first time around: even though the album’s called Ten Readings of a Warning there is no ready sense of threat in these easygoing ballads. Well, it’s not straightforward—for starters there are 11, not ten, tracks. And the lyrics are so oblique that you can’t easily pull out warnings from what, at times, seem to be straightforward love songs. There is a maturity here that is a welcome change from the continual renewal of youth in pop music. And if Fairchild’s songs seem simple and laid back on the surface, a closer listen occasionally reveals something more interesting. The opening of “Early Man”, for example, has this soft cacophony of voices in the background that switch off as the tune revs up, but which re-emerge throughout the song. There are many other examples scattered throughout the album.

Fairchild’s best songs are conventionally pretty but not obvious. “Pile of Burning Leaves” is immediate and appealing, with its easy country strum. As the song opens up leisurely—All Smiles’ way—the full unease at the song’s centre comes into focus: “Not having a baby, why, this celebration breaks me down.”  “Moth in a Cloud of Smoke” is also effective; though it doesn’t have the celebratory ease of a Portastatic song, it is subtly and effectively upbeat—especially given the melancholia that pervades the rest of the album. And “I Know It’s Wrong” legitimizes the laid-back approach—sure it’s MOR, but this simple melody, built off quickly resolved suspensions and block piano chords, works as well for Fairchild as it did for the Beatles (and everyone else).

But there are a few problems. One is that many of these songs are pitched in the same range, with the same mid-tempo accompaniments. So that no matter how sophisticated the chord changes or how left-field the melodies, songs necessarily fall into a type. The disc sorts out into acoustic- and piano-based tracks, and though there are some highlights among the acoustic-backed tracks these songs more easily fall into a predictable pattern. “Summer Stay”, with its bittersweet exhortation, “Summer’s day don’t end too soon / For all I know, this time is gonna drift away,” is one of a couple of examples. Lyrically, too, the listener’s sometimes left in the dark. An example: “Of course it’s not up to me / Now it’s here, I should celebrate a course of cautious conceit.” Neat alliteration, mystifying meaning though. It’s like that here and there throughout Ten Readings of a Warning, and it detracts from the power and immediacy of these otherwise pleasant compositions, on the whole.

So together, All Smiles isn’t going to blow many people away; but here’s a true, well-conceived, and modestly executed album of understated, mature understanding. It’s enough to appreciate Ten Readings of a Warning for that.

• "Moth in a Cloud of Smoke" MP3