After three cassette demos and numerous gigs throughout the city, the Novellas finally have a full-length release. Orson Welles would have loved this. Cinematic, ambitious in scope, and wearing a chilled elegance like the frost on a champagne glass, these twelve songs parade before the listener like esteemed guests at a grand hotel.

At the core, the Novellas are songwriter Peter Chance on vocals and guitar, and arranger Laura Ogar on keyboards. Augmented by percussion, drums, and bass—with strings and trumpet added for flavor—the Novellas live up to their name as storytellers. No two tales are alike—in fact, the subject matter is wildly divergent. “The Drunken Toreador” is a melodrama about the slow, besotten demise of a bullfighter who has lost his nerve after being gored, “Nina” reports on the doings of a Russian parapsychic (skeptics insist she bends spoons using “hidden magnets in intimate places”), and alien abduction is the topic in “There Goes Betty Again” (Ogar uses a theremin for authentic ’50s tingle).

What unites these seemingly fractious dramas is a glimmering presence of death, as illuminated by Ogar’s washes of sound alongside Chance’s startled-cat vocal phrasing. In this music, death doesn’t appear abruptly as the Grim Reaper—instead it’s with us every day, breathing an unspoken awareness of mortality into all that lives, rendering each moment of existence immediate, vivid and often painful. Sometimes death holds your hand, as in “Jack’s Lullaby” (that’s Jack Kevorkian), other times it introduces itself as a prequel for what’s to come: a demi-death as in “Graduation Day.” Whereas the norm in this genre would default to death-metal noise and Drano-scarred vocals, the Novellas are artful, melodic, and imaginative to the brink of intoxication, and are frequently categorized as chamber-pop. It is, however, a chamber that lies very close to a crypt.