On the cover of the dutch quartet Bettie Serveert's debut album, Palomine, is a plastic puppy that looks as if it were bought at a swap meet. Though the pup's sad gaze is as charming as front-woman Carol van Dijk's sugar-sandpaper singing and its blobs of runaway glue as sloppy as the band's rhythms, those parallels probably weren't intentional. The album art simply reflects the casual abandon that propels this group's bittersweet indie-pop sound.

Bettie Serveert nicked its name from Dutch tennis star Betty Stove's book Betty Serves, but the band's lopsided pop songs have about as much to do with nets and rackets as John McEnroe does with feedback and flannel. On Palomine, Van Dijk's oddball inflections go from laid-back to impatient. Her dubious, over-enunciated American accent comes out in funny, warbled mouthfuls, delivered with an edgy but nonchalant Rickie Lee Jones cool. Behind her, guitarist Peter Visser cranks out weepy, raw Neil Young-style solos. The sour cherry on the icing is that it all sounds like it's being pumped through a partially blown amp.

"Palomine" is as endearing as a five-year-old's finger painting. Van Dijk reaches for high notes and hits bum ones but doesn't seem to mind. "And the su-uu-uu-un will always shine," she sings liltingly, "on this palomine." Such dorky lyrics can come off as sweet and naive. But they're not – they actually sound like deep emotional purges. Better still, Van Dijk avoids the indie-girl formula of dreamy and vulnerable, and she doesn't have to scrawl slut across her belly like a riot grrrl to make her point. "You call me a tom boy and I love it," she sings on "Tom Boy," "cause only a tom boy could stand above it – and simply change it."

But Van Dijk would rather knee you in the balls than coddle your senses. In "Kid's Allright," her voice goes hard and flat while the guitar jerks out fuzzy chords over an addictive skiffle beat. "Back in the bushes, found a cat, and beat him up with a baseball bat," she blurts in a blasé tone. The album's only disappointments are the chaotic but sterile "Healthy Sick," written by Lou Barlow of Sebadoh, and the opiated "Brain-Tag," which feels like an empty Velvet Underground comedown.

Bettie Serveert's Palomine is as untamed and free as pop gets yet as irresistible as a Bay City Saturday night.

Palomine is available from Matador Records, 676 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10012. (RS 655)

LORRAINE ALI