Amidst the Seattle grunge-rock surge of the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Posies struck their own idiosyncratic path. In 1988, Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, two indie-pop prodigies from Bellingham, Washington, released their homemade album debut, Failure—on cassette. Still in their teens, Auer and Stringfellow reframed their influences—the Beatles, Beach Boys, XTC, R.E.M., Talking Heads, the Smiths, the Replacements, Hüsker Dü—into a precocious collection of deftly crafted, infectiou...