Chicago-by-way-of-South-Bend’s Ratboys’ sweetly forthright mix of indie fuzz and slight alt-country grit stakes out the same front-porch/backyard territory as bands like Waxahatchee and Wednesday: Music for getting up and greeting the day with frankness, honesty, and a working-person’s reasonable allocation of poetry and magic. (Chicago itself—birthplace of Wilco, birthplace of Cheap Trick—has always been coded as both cosmopolitan and sort of ordinary, the major metropolitan dream adjacent to the cornfield.) The best tracks on Singin’ to an Empty Chair are the ones where they sound most reconciled to the child inside. The disarming crescendo of “Open Up” (like spinning in a field until you fall down laughing) and “At Peace in the Hundred Acre Wood” are both played perfectly by vocalist Julia Steiner, who oscillates between knowledge and naivete, Wendy and Peter Pan. Only the band knows what the sound that opens the swang-stompin’ “Penny in the Lake” is, but it sure sounds like a rooster.