When some kids graduate from high school, their parents reward them with a car or a month off backpacking across Europe.

Aaron Rossetto wanted a four-track recorder.

Rossetto is the one-man songwriter, performer and producer behind Austin, Texas' Ask For Joy, whose layers of shimmering guitars, angelic vocals and expansive harmonies awash in reverb recall at once the fuzzy shoegaze of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, the Phil Spector-mit-syringe songs of Jesus and Mary Chain, and the poppy, tight harmonic sensibilities of the Beach Boys.

It's not hard to understand the genesis of these sounds. As a child, picking up instruments came easy to Aaron and he was writing and recording songs in his early teenage years. Whether he was writing his own songs or putting Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson to music, he set up shop in his basement bedroom and pointed two tape recorders at each other, playing and singing along with himself to mimic the sounds he heard in musical heroes Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor. A few years later, he was doing the same thing, but using a real four-track recorder instead.

It is remarkable is to listen to these early recordings and realize how much they share with the very latest in the Ask For Joy catalogue—an emphasis on sweet, catchy pop melodies couched in layers of keyboards, guitars and beautiful, multiply-tracked vocal harmonies. As must all things evolve, the dry acoustic guitars and lo-fi Amiga-sequenced beats give way to heavily effected electric guitars and drum machines, but the lineage is unmistakably apparent.

The four-song EP Swoon, released to MySpace in 2005, was followed by 2007's Endless Space Unfurled EP, with five of American poet Sara Teasdale's poems set to Rossetto's blissful soundscapes. Incorporating everything from the pedal steel celestial ascension of 'Peace' to the heavily overdriven open guitar drones that swirl through 'Alone', the album gives a strong, sympathetic voice to Teasdale's soaringly lyrical, yet often somber work.

Life In A Coma, Ask For Joy's third EP, sees a continuation of the same dense, dreamy tone of the last two albums, but with a distinctly sharper, more pop-oriented focus. Devotions and rememberances of passion past swim through the fuzzy, enveloping guitar shimmer of 'Summercrush' and 'Heaven In You', while the deep reverb on the drum beat of 'My Deepest Ocean' propels a treacly love song whose mellifluous harmonies sing as much the praises of its subject as do the lyrics. 'Pull My String' and 'The Sacrifice' anchor a turn towards darker subjects, all the while maintaining the same Beach Boys-meet-Slowdive by way of The Jesus And Mary Chain sound. Finally, 'Glory Glory' is a prayer thrown up to the heavens, perhaps in desperation, through gospel-tinged hand claps, foot stamps and pipe organ drone that accompany the background choir and lead vocal. The whole album might be My Bloody Valentine fronted by Art Garfunkel.

Taking the project's name from a want ad for roommates at Brock University in Rossetto's hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario, Ask For Joy's music is characterised by a fusion of the rawness of DIY esthetic with rich, atmospheric waves of sound supporting a textured and dense dream pop sound.