I love when Sound Opinions listeners hep me to a favorite band that soon enough becomes one of mine, too, as happened with our caller Chris from London during the most recent episode, the Best of 2016 So Far. Big cheers for Tacocat, the Seattle quartet with a fondness for pop culture silliness, palindromes, and delightfully effervescent garage-pop melodies.

The group’s third album starts with a track that sums up everything it does right: “Dana Katherine Scully” is an instantly irresistible tribute to a smart, strong, and self-assured woman, a blow against the patriarchy that also makes you laugh and which boasts three hooks that you just can’t get out of your head. (And that from an X-Files non-believer, though I did love Gillian Anderson in The Fall.)

So it goes throughout these 12 tracks, with singer Emily Nokes good-naturedly railing against mansplaining while celebrating various forces of nature ranging from the looming Northwest Earthquake to horses to… um, her time of the month, all over her bandmates’ surf-inflected Nuggets-style grooves.

Need a dose of sugary fun? The answer is out there, and it’s Lost Time. In fact, the only way the album could be better is if it also included the new theme the group just recorded for the reboot of The Powerpuff Girls. But here that is now!

Tacocat, Lost Time (Sub Pop)

Rating on the 4-star scale: 3.5 stars.

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