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Private Eleanor makes music so perfect for solitary drives on the cusp of late night/early morning that you want to rewind back a decade and listen to the band's music on an unlabeled C90 in your old beater's tape deck. It helps that driving and travel feature heavily in the lyrics on Sweethearting, the local indie-rock band's most recent batch of lovelorn ballads, shaded in with singer-guitarist Austin Stahl's specific splashes of local color like "Down Waterview," with its references to Gwynns Falls, TV Hill, and construction on the parkway. Or there's "This Year I'm Going See the Sun," where Stahl sighs about being stuck in traffic on I-83 during the morning rush.

The drizzly, cinematic sweep of Stahl's road-weary, twentysomething heartbreak is more sharply observed than ever, set to a lush swirl of bells, vibraphone, Hammond organ, and Rhodes piano meticulously arranged for the tingling of spines, crisply recorded and hitting all the band's now well-established sweet spots. There are still the quick, driving Wilco-esque rockers like "A Better Way to Run" that make for perfect highway-cruising music after an April shower. And there are still the softer numbers like "Temporary Homes," a slow dance where Stahl sings of wanting "a place to be" when he's far from home. According to the liner notes, the lyrics to Sweethearting add up to tell a story, but each song works beautifully as a little standalone slice of baroque indie-pop, wherever they may fit into Stahl's finely crafted whole.