Time travel is such a tricky business. If you're not careful, you end up going back, hooking up with your mom and siring yourself, going face-to-face with an earlier version of yourself or subtly but profoundly mucking up history, and before you know it, you're stuck in one of those paradoxes lazy sci-fi writers love so, so much.

Pop music is also a tricky business. If you're not careful, you end up putting the blinders on and pursuing hooks at the expense of all else or getting too clever and losing the genre's all-important accessibility. Next thing you know, you're knee-deep in a full-length that nobody's very interested in.

Vanilla Swingers navigate both difficult propositions, tackling pop music (concretely speaking) and time travel (thematically, at least), without getting tangled in any of the paradoxes or pitfalls associated with either. Using a combination of electronic and organic pop music that alternately suggests everything from Pet Shop Boys and Saint Etienne to Black Box Recorder and The Long Blondes, the Swingers (primarily Miles Jackson and Anne Gilpin with a few occasional collaborators), the duo indulges in a loose love story of boy meets girl, boy and girl traverse the fourth dimension, boy loses girl, three decades later, boy gets girl back. You know, standard sci-fi soap-opera dramas.

While the loose concept and well crafted pop sit at the heart of Vanilla Swingers' sound, it's Gilpin's vocals that bring the album to life. She veers from a calm-and-collected poise reminiscent of Black Box's Sarah Nixey and the cool-and-not-so-collected heights of Debby Harry. Jackson shares vocals, but he's painfully outclassed by his partner -- Gilpin transforms Vanilla Swingers from a moderately interesting bedroom recording project into a contender. "I'll Stay Next to You," constructed from a steadfast bass line and ticking programmed beats, and "Goodbye Lennon," a stylized synth number, showcase the band's most sophisticated side, merging electronics vaguely descended from new wave with modern pop. "Hives," which twists and turns through its share of pocket-symphony type radical changes of direction, and "The Town," a basic piano and acoustic track, strengthen the Black Box Recorder similarities, with sparse, effective arrangements stepping into the background to let Gilpin's voice steer the show. A few piano numbers ("Back to the Present") threaten to bog down the album's middle stretch, though they're effectively countered with electro-pop tracks that hint at vintage New Order or Pet Shop Boys ("Danger in the Past").

Navigating urbane pop is nearly as difficult as paradox-free time travel. Or so we've gathered from soaking up paperback sci-fi and a life of records. Vanilla Swingers pull both off, keeping its concept from collapsing into rock-opera excesses while crafting cerebral pop tunes. Now if the duo can just perfect a flux capacitor or a TARDIS, we'd be in business.