It's a really great fractured pop album that I have trouble understanding on a conscious level. There's plenty of actual song structure here, just balanced on foundations that seem in danger of toppling at any moment. Familiar, but ever-so-slightly dangerous. 99% straight visceral, aggressive and seductive in no particular order and often both at once; sounding almost as if the band just took whatever bits of noise were left lying around the studio, wired them together in whatever way seemed to make sense at one in the morning, then went out drinking. (And at some point came back to lay down some vocals.)
It leads off with a killer driving thumping punkish thing and there's bits of that throughout, but then the tunes have an odd habit of turning inside-out and becoming pretty when you finally get into the spirit of the YEEEARRGH. And then there's little funky bits of atmosphere and off-balance percussion thunderstorms and scarily pretty high-pitched harmonies that drift through every now and again and a drum machine stacatto dirge-thing and a slithery electronic distorted keyboard riff and lyrics that bypass any specific sense of time or place and then another stacatto noise attack and a steady-repeating scratchy guitar figure with vocals recorded through a tin can and a far-off atonal refrain that repeats endlessly over a steely harpsichord-guitar line to set up the dreamy droning ballad at the end that wraps it all up.
It's a record I can't resist, full of little textural things that catch me by surprise and hypnotic swirling bits and then the occasional straight punch to the jaw. A post-punk album in the best possible sense, subverting expectations at every turn and melding emotion and intellect so deftly that they become one and the same.
Two-thousand-seven has the noise we've been needing. Play loud.
-PAR
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