Listen, I just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland because it’s the book that “inspired” Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, so I’m in a bit of a mood. I can’t say exactly how I’d describe that mood, but it’s resonating nicely with Tuneless Blues, the new EP from the Bret Tobias Set, which I suppose makes sense since Tobias describes his music as “indie, dad goth, old dude” music. Take the lead track, “Sepviva Shuffle,” for instance. It’s jangly in a way that appeals to my classic power-pop sensibilities, and the lyrics have a strong Pynchonesque echo that speaks to the ways in which the deep, dark past always haunts the present. Sepviva, it turns out, was the name of a Quaker-owned plantation in Philadelphia that relied upon the labor of enslaved people to turn a profit in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It’s also a street in that same city where townhouses go for three-quarters of a million dollars and the name of an affordable housing development that broke ground last year. To put it mildly, the history is complicated, and so is the song despite its deceptively simple toe-tapping trappings. “A change comes slow,” Tobias sings, in what might be the lyrical understatement of the year. “Gradually then suddenly,” he adds the second time around, foreshadowing the theme of the next track, “It Begins with a Lean.” And what about that cover art? Emaciated, bony hands resting on rubble? Or are they clawing their way back from the dark recesses of history? I’d say more, but I feel like I’m being watched.