If you never heard Paper Television, the 2007 album from the Portland duo the Blow, you missed something small but special. Back before he devoted himself full-time to YACHT, Jona Bechtolt made all the music for Paper Television, cranking out these lovably tinny home-recorded approximations of gleaming mainstream pop music. Khaela Maricich, his partner in the group, sang over those tracks, using them as a bed for intense and personal and highly specific lyrics. Her voice was blithe and conversational, but her actual words were the sorts of things you'd only say to another person if you were in the midst of some souls-entwining 3AM connection-binge: "If something in the deli aisle makes you cry / Of course I'll wrap my arms around you and I'll walk you outside / Through the sliding doors / Why would I lie?" That dynamic, between Maricich's diary-pages communiques and Bechtolt's homespun Casio-pop beats, felt new and strange if you were part of the small audience that was paying attention. On "True Affection," the last song of the album, Bechtolt hijacked the beat from D4L's "Laffy Taffy," the biggest and dumbest song in the universe at that time, so that Maricich could sing about the way attraction sometimes can't overcome our own weird personal distance: "I never felt so close / I never felt so all alone." For these two to be taking the language of pop music -- or doing their best to take it, anyway -- while using it to sing this starkly intimate stuff, was a powerful thing. It affected me, and I haven't heard another album that did things the way that album did. Until now.