"Is it that obvious?" Bryce Colenbrander sheepishly asks.

The Soiree's guitarist/vocalist is responding to a comment that the finely crafted Perfect Crimes, a track from his band's second full-length album, recalls one of Colenbrander's stated idols, the late, lamented local band Kepler.

Colenbrander's mock embarrassment is mixed with a sense of pride. Pride in his band's ability to pull off a Kepler-worthy original.

Pride in a CD brimming with such clever musical ideas.

Pride in the fact he, guitarist and co-singer/songwriter Matthew Arnold, drummer Eric Roberts and guitarist Mike Armstrong might, with the striking CD Minor Details, finally shed the alt-country tag that has dogged the band since, well, the days when The Soiree was an alt-country band.

(Minor Details, for the record, presents only fleeting glimpses of that hillbilly past -- Armstrong's twangy lead in opening track Coast to Coast; the hop-step feel of closer Wives in the Night; the Don-and-Phil harmonies of Accustomed to the Noise. None of the above can be considered a bad thing.)

The pride is understandable. Minor Details delivers on the promise of the 2006 release Birds. Vocalists Arnold and Colenbrander continue to play dueling songwriters to great effect. But two years' worth live gigs have sharpened the edge of the band's jagged pop-rock sound.

The Soiree's resident composers, meanwhile, have become masters of brevity. There is much here to savour. Yet nary a note, much less a word, is wasted.

"We talked about the length thing," Colenbrander says. "The songs could have been longer, but we wanted to make sure there wasn't anything there just to make the songs some sort of 'standard' length."

"Some of the songs on Birds do go on a bit," Arnold adds. "I listen to this record and after 30 minutes it feels complete. It's a 60-minute record's worth of ideas in 30 minutes. If we had made these songs two years ago they would all have been four minutes long."

As it stands, only one track, the beauteous The Work That We Do, passes that four-minute mark. By contrast, the uptempo Hide the Evidence takes some 50 seconds to get to the first chorus and presents us with an abrupt final chord precisely 60 second later.

"It's all part of trying to mix up the process," Colenbrander says of his band's musical evolution. "We did not want this record to sound like the last record."