Kevin Bronson on June 21st, 2010

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On any number of his eight albums – especially his last three – Matt Pond PA comes off as warm and inviting, his trenchant observations on the human condition oozing with yearning, and wrapped in pastoral arrangements.

Live, Pond – who’s now based in NY and has said he might even be moving to CA – can be a bit inscrutable, like the guy you knew in college who was so talented and quick-minded that he was unapproachable, although he bared everything in his art. And in that way, his show Thursday night at the Troubadour fell short of the goose-pimply intimacy his orchestral pop wields.

• ||| Photos by Laurie Scavo

Playing to a crowd coming down from the adrenaline rush of watching the Lakers defeat the Boston Celtics in Game 7 of the NBA Finals – poor Lunar Youth, whose set ran concurrently with the fourth quarter of the game, which was being televised in the Troub’s front bar – Pond stuck more to his estimable back catalog rather than campaign hard for his newest release, “The Dark Leaves.”

And while you can appreciate any artist who truncates his intros to “This is a song” and lets the music speak for itself, Pond kept the audience – few, if any, of whom were seeing him for the first time – mostly at arm’s length. That said, he bounced back after his first guitar succumbed early in the set, and all the elements (except strings) in his music were there in the 17-song outing, the twining guitars, his soaring tenor and the night-ending trip back to 2002 for “Fairlee.”

Genial Nova Scotians Wintersleep, too, failed to coalesce the energy on their latest release, “New Inheritors.” Their sound, a homogenization of a lot of popular modern strains, might have been the perfect exclamation point to the basketball game, but their set failed to get into any kind of groove, even on the excursions when the quintet became something of an indie-rock jam band.