Heaven in Polka Dots.

I am not sure there’s a currently-working musical act that I’ve fallen more completely in love with than the Pipettes.

Let me explain. No, is too complicated, let me sum up: I’ve been a devotee of the girl-group sound of the 1960s for years, especially the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las, two very New York groups of girls who served as a major inspiration for Blondie, Holly & the Italians and other new wave bands. I’m an aficionado of producers like Phil Spector, Shadow Morton, Jack Nietszche, and whoever was running the boards for the Supremes. (Not Berry Gordy, surely?) I’m just as fascinated by the unknowns and the also-rans: Rhino’s new One Kiss Can Lead to Another box set is kind of a wet dream of shimmering sounds, overly dramatic vocals, and cooing lyrics that account for a great deal of what I think of as pop music. And the music’s descendents, Kirsty MacColl chiefly among them, who used the glossy, gorgeous sound to deliver more personal, and often bitter, satirical, or simply comic, songs.

So, the Pipettes. I’ve known about them for a while: a British group of girls in polka-dot dresses, singing quaint, sassy songs. I downloaded few singles, a lot of demos, thought “that’s cute,” and went back to Belle & Sebastian and other Now Pop artists.

Sure, the “I Like a Boy in Uniform (School Uniform)” single made it onto a playlist, but I agreed with some Pitchfork writer that it was probably their greatest achievement, and that they wouldn’t really go to the next level until they got some real songwriters giving them material that could do justice to their admittedly-gorgeous harmonies.

Then their debut album was released. (Or, rather, will be released next month. Yes, I am a bad person. In my defense, I’ll buy it even as an import. And maybe a second copy to convert the unconverted.) I listened to it as one of many albums I listen to, often only once or twice. But a couple hours later I came back to it. Then again, and again. I could not stop listening to it. (Or to Lily Allen’s demos at roughly the same time. But that’s another, if similar, story.)

The album is a pocket-sized universe. I’m neither afraid nor embarrassed to compare it to Pet Sounds. Yes, I said it. Pet Sounds. It is a pop masterpiece with roots in the 60s, a post-feminist attitude from yesterday morning, a very British ear for the nuanced comedy inherent in relationships, and one of the most perfect examples of wielding all the resources of the recording studio as an instrument since the heyday of ABBA. Spector comparisons can and undoubtedly will be made, but Shadow Morton and British genius/loony Joe Meek are closer to the point, while Brian Wilson’s elusive shade flickers just on the periphery. Each song can be unpacked for references and allusions to other pop songs; here’s the opening drumbeat to “Be My Baby,” followed by the opening guitar chord from the Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey.” There a quick whiff of “The Loco-Motion,” and over there is the epic dramatic space of “The Leader of the Pack.”

But they never spill over into mere nostalgia; they’re too canny for the shoop-shoop-delang-delangs that less sophisticated artists might use as girl-group signifiers. The songs vacillate between sexual one-upmanship and sarcastic heartbreak; they don’t want to fall in love or you to fall in love with them, they just want to dance with you, shag you and leave you; they laugh at your attempts at seduction; they brood cynically about love lost, denied, or missing; they tell cheeky stories about other girls whose love affairs tend towards sinister ends. Pulp is an obvious forebear, but they come from a long line of scarred romantics including Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and the Rolling Stones’ pre-Satanic Majesties ballads. And Kirsty MacColl, of course.

(I recently managed to find a digital copy of Kirsty’s long-0ut-of-print debut vinyl album, much of which has never been released on CD. It’s the patterning work here, even if the Pipettes never heard it.)

But.

But then the album ends with a glorious, soaring resolution, as the girls sing “I love you, I love you, I love you” over and over again, as if to make up for all the loves deferred, lost, or laughed at over the rest of the album: the tears, the anger, the bitchiness all forgotten in the cascading bliss of new love, like the end of a satisfying romance novel (I’ve been re-reading Austen lately; I’m a sucker for that stuff), the promise of undying faithfulness: “there will never come a time when we have to say goodbye, because I love you.”

I don’t know how much of the album’s sonic detail and sheer beauty is due to the three girls who make up the face of the Pipettes, or how much is due to the anonymous rest of the band, producers, whoever. (Liner notes will no doubt in due time relieve all anxiety.) But it doesn’t matter, either: loving the Ronettes doesn’t require knowing all about Phil Spector, but simply listening to the songs and being caught up in the whole tragi-romantic drama of it all.

Girl stuff, I guess you’d call it.

Oh well; I’ve always liked girls better than guys, anyway.