It starts out like Girl Group 101: handclaps, hurry-up-and-wait rhythm, four-note piano rumble, bratty cheerleader taunts. "Can't you see we're through?" "Boy, get out of my face!"

Those of us who follow the nascent Phil Spector revival have come to expect this sort of thing from the Pipettes, three British girls in polka-dot dresses singing not-that-innocent playground ditties and brandishing a manifesto about how the Beatles ruined pop music.

But when "Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me" hits its chorus, the gimmicks melt away. One Pipette coos mightily in a full, feathery voice, "And you might cry for some time/ And you might try to hold my hand again." (Holy crap, where have those pipes been hiding?) Another Pipette interjects: "But you don't know it! But you don't know it!" Behind them, their backing band's wall of sound finally becomes a Wall of Sound, thanks to the divinely intervening hands of producers Andy Dragazis (Blue States) and Gareth Parton (The Go! Team).

Ruefully concluding their fourth album, Push the Heart, "Come Up" reduces the Devics' bewitching dream-pop aesthetic to its sparest ingredients: Sara Lov's breathy, brittle vocals, and Dustin O'Halloran's discreet, moody instrumentation. Taken literally, the song calls to mind a last-chance plea to Virginia Woolf-- a hotline soliloquy delivered during her valedictory swim. But stepping back, it assumes the shape of a modernist lullaby, about shattered beliefs in our ability to express ourselves, to generate meaning.

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