By now it’s become an all too familiar pattern. Talented musician creates high quality tunes on the Twin Cities scene only to eventually flee for the bright lights of New York City and its higher wattage music industry. The gambit has certainly worked well for Craig Finn and the Hold Steady boys and based on the strength of Two Dark Birds, the debut recording from former Minneapolitan Steve Koester’s new country rock band, the odds of a similar Midwesterner-turned-NYC-resident success story seem good.

Listen to “Blown” from Two Dark Birds

Far removed from the scrappy tunes Koester was cranking out back in the late ’90s with local post-punk quartet Punchdrunk, Two Dark Birds is soulful, smooth and buttery. It’s the kind of record I would have anticipated Koester making if he had picked up stakes for Laurel Canyon, not Brooklyn. Admittedly taking its cues from such heavily baked country-rock classics as Neil Young’s On the Beach, the album flows nicely , with plenty of languid sun stroked tunes like “Blown,”  while leaving room for the occassional dark dirge workhorse like “Pernod Blues” (which features a fractured guitar solo whose minimalist genius has Young’s influence written all over it).

Throughout Koester’s cracked cigarette-stained croon serves as the ideal launching pad for a range of tales encompassing topics both large and small: the joys and perils of getting wasted (“Blown,” “Cut Down to Size”), romantic entanglements both good (“When I Sleep I Dream of You”) and bad (“Great Plains”). The ragged charm of Koester’s voice and his embattled lyrical protagonists provide a nice anchor for the band’s loose limbed bounce which features plenty of sparkling keys and boozy pedal steel runs.

Listen to “My Mother The Stereo” from Two Dark Birds

The most compelling tune is “My Mother The Stereo” a fine addition to the canon of songs in which the songwriters ponders, “Has my devotion to rock music ruined my life?” Koester treats the question with the wry wisdom befitting a grizzled indie music veteran (“How’d I end up in this house of transgression?/This ain’t a mansion with a pretty pension/It’s just a pg pen for messed up mansions, my dear/How’d I get from there to here?/Umbilical cord headphone cord guitar chord/My music in utero/My mother the stereo/Was that the place that this whole thing started?”)

An understated beauty that holds up well to repeated listens, Two Dark Birds can take its place alongside the best of Koester’s work both in group settings (he’s one third of the stellar songwriting team driving NYC Canyon-rock purveyors Maplewood , recently featured prominently on the soundtrack to Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows Your Dead) and solo, not to mention similarly influenced records I’ve heard in the last few years by higher profile acts.

COMING UP: Two Dark Birds play on Thursday, April 3, at the 7^th St. Entry . With Dallas Orbiter, Mike Wisti. 9 p.m. $6. 21+

Two Dark Birds

[Editor's Note: Click here to read an interview I did with Koester back in 2005 when Maplewood was coming to the Cities that run in the Pulse of the Twin Cities.]