Having spent most of my life in the Midwest, my months-old relocation to San Francisco has completely skewed any sense of seasonal shifts. Without dramatic temperature drops and changing leaves to cue me that fall has arrived, it was only on a recent trip to New England that I really registered that autumn has actually been around for weeks.

Returning home to the City by the Bay, I’ve had to make do with overcast skies and the occasional rainy day. But as I try to recalibrate my fall signals (an endeavor that may never be successful), I’ve discovered that my musical tastes still take a turn when summer hits the road. Most days I’ll listen to less straight-up pop and instead shuffle toward the languid, the melancholy, the widescreen-sweep of contemplative tunes that seem to soundtrack these more days so much better. For whatever reason, Autumn calls for more organic instrumentation, with drum loops and synths (cold though they may be) not quite fitting the bill.

So if you can forgive me for being a little late in falling in line with fall, before we rush headlong into the holidays (mostly, anyway), I’m going to share some tunes over the next few days that strike the right tone for this time of year.

Mt. Desolation is a supergroup of sorts, a side project birthed in a Dublin pub by Tim Rice-Oxley and Jesse Quin of Keane. The pair figured it might be fun to record a country album with some of their musical friends, cutting as much of it live as possible. Recording commenced early in 2010, with members of The Killers, Mumford & Sons, Noah and the Whale, The Long Winters, and The Staves among the pals who participated in the project.

Mt. Desolation’s self-titled debut was released late last month, and while some of the album travels a little too down home for my tastes (the honky-tonk “Platform 7,” for one), on the whole, the alt-country feel of the album hits all my autumn buttons. Begin your trip through Mt. Desolation by taking the melodic “Bitter Pill”:

Purchase Mt. Desolation – “Bitter Pill” via iTunes, Amazon MP3.