ALBUM REVIEWS

FOSTER THE PEOPLE Sacred Hearts Club Columbia

It’s not easy being Foster the People. Making sophisticated pop with thoughtful lyrics in candy-coated hooks is like being a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body. Sacred Hearts Club gets the delicate mix right, getting progressively more complex as you go, delivering pure shimmering pop like Pay the Man at the beginning, and ending with such complex, thrilling songs as Loyal Like Sid & Nancy and Harden the Paint.

Led by lead singer, guitarist and keyboardist Mark Foster, the quartet also features multiinstrumentalist Isom Innis, who helped produce.

Lyrically, the band ranges from the obscure to the simple. Making ambitious pop isn’t easy — just ask Phoenix or Glass Animals — but the band pairs joyous melodies with thought-provoking content in ever-increasing complexity and lets you find your sweet spot. The thing is: You will find it.

SARA EVANS Words Born to Fly

Many musicians like to say their work is deeply personal, but Sara Evans may have taken that a step further in her impressive new album, Words.

The country star invites her 14-year-old daughter to sing on Marquee Sign, gathers three siblings to contribute harmonies on Night Light and sings about her oldest son soon going to college in Letting You Go.

In the wrong hands, such moves might feel manipulative. Not here, with an Evans brimming with confidence and using her immensely appealing voice on a batch of very strong songs. Words is the first album on her own record label and it captures an artist in full musical flight.

Standouts include the hard-driving, Marquee Sign (“I wish you were a pack of cigarettes/’Cause you would’ve come with a warning”), the poppy Rain and Fire, the worldbeat friendly Diving in Deep and the catchy I Need a River.

LITTLE SILVER Somewhere You Found My Name Record Park

If the debut album by Little Silver, an intriguing folk-rock quartet out of Brooklyn, N.Y., has echoes of the spacey jangle-rock of the late 1990s and early 2000s, so what?

And while Somewhere You Found My Name may not venture far from its predecessors in any singular way, it works a pretty sweet spot to gorgeous effect.

Listen, for example, to a cut called Anytown and hear echoes of the New Pornographers. The brew of ethereal harmonies, majestic arrangements and gentle melodies proves there was more precious metal in those hills.

Little Silver was borne of the marriage of Steve Curtis, an old folky, and Erika Simonian, who worked in various bands with a harder edge. They write descriptively; in You Slept Through Summer, an evocative sonic journey through the passing of time, the words themselves are so rich they feel like instruments.