I have a problem with The Soft Hills’ name: it could just as easily name a landscape painting in a dentist’s waiting room. Actually, it could be the name of one of my mom’s old landscape paint-by-number projects, which, with all due respect to my mother, are not art. But The Soft Hills make music that is undeniably art–not business, not pop machine, but art. If these sounds were a painting, their warm, psych-folk glow would be the light of the surrealists. They would have borrowed Grizzly Bear’s canvas, Beach House’s colors, Sigur Ros’ brushes and returned them all ruined. And the soft hills stretched across the image would not be some overdone, unmoving pasture, but a spiraling, swarming, swirling desert expanse. With Karl Blau, The Pica Beats. MARY PAULINE DIAZ

Fri., Jan. 28, 10 p.m., 2011