Titles had a sound in mind for its third record before the songs even took shape.After making the bright, buoyant indie-pop album "Up With the Sun" in 2008, the New Haven band took the opposite approach on its latest, "Dirt Bell" (Safety Meeting). Instead of returning to the top-notch studio in Bridgeport where the group tracked "Up With the Sun," the musicians recorded "Dirt Bell" themselves in piecemeal fashion in their rehearsal space, a furniture store owned by one band member's father, and in singer, songwriter and guitarist Brad Amorosino's apartment."I think from the start we knew it was going to be a bit slower, a bit more dreary," says Amorosino, who is assembling the band for a CD-release show Saturday at Café Nine in New Haven. "Recording more stuff alone in smaller spaces seemed like it fit better with that type of mood."His description undersells the album. "Dirt Bell" is indeed slower, and sometimes moody, but the songs are gorgeous, artful constructs, with layers of lush vocal harmonies on "Pillowcase," woozy, off-kilter guitars on "Who To Hold" and mournful steel guitar and ghostly backing vocals on the slow-building "What Would It Take."Amorosino, 28 (who works for Fairfield Weekly, a subsidiary of The Courant), initially intended the album to be a companion piece to a book he wrote last year, "Demon in the Dirt Bell," a story about a man searching for a mystical bell with the power to turn evil creatures to dust."All the lyrics were going to be words from the book, and it was all going to be tied together, but it was an idea that didn't need to happen," Amorosino says with a chuckle. "They separated themselves at some point, branched off."Amorosino often worked on the songs by himself at home, calling band mates to drop by when he had an idea he wanted to flesh out."That's an easy way to work. I don't think it's the best way to work, but luckily, I think we got some really nice performances out of that kind of thing," he says. "Since we finished this record, the band has been doing a lot more writing together, and that's how I prefer to proceed. It just makes everything more colorful when you have different heads working on something and you have more voices.""Dirt Bell" is easily the best of Titles' three albums.Hartford Courant,June 08, 2010|By Eric R. Danton