Now You Are This

The songs here are pensive and worry-stained, all minimal, bluntly entrancing riffs, insistent drumming, and tense, reverberant synthesizers. Thirteen tracks of dazed and charged near-collapse that unexpectedly catch in your mind, echoing their haunted buzz long after the record ends. The weave of raw, upright vocals lends a poignant, unflinching, and steady guide to the dogged, swirling waves of sound that propel the record. Numbers draw a line from the honest clarity of traditional American music like the Carter Family through the troubled pounding of today, creating an appropriately dark vision of tomorrow's pop music.