Recomend if you like: ELO, The Beach Boys, Guided by Voices, Matthew Sweet, Starflyer 59 (retro-pop era), Superchunk / Portastic. There Is No Feeling Better, the fourth album from Bloomington, Indiana's Mike Adams at His Honest Weight finds the titular Adams, the singer / songwriter / multi-instrumentalist / producer at the center of the independent pop institution, focused less on who he is and more on where he is. Though the album's not short on truthful introspection, it's an outward gaze that defines these eleven songs. It’s the kind of record you can make only after really knowing how to make records. It’s ambitious, but never laboured sounding, sweeping but always intimate. All the qualities that have made the Adams songbook such a joyful collection to engage with—the witticism of 2011’s Oscillate Wisely, the playful experimentalism of 2014’s Best of Boiler Room Classics, the gigantic melodies of 2016’s Casino Drone are on display here yet again, but they feel heightened, deeper, funnier, sweeter, and more resonant. Pulling from disparate sources, like retro-pop era Starflyer 59, ELO, the Beach Boys at their most transcendental, the Southern gospel of the Isaacs, and the dead-serious humor of The Roches, Adams has shaped these touchstones into a new world.