Now You Are This [CD]

Butterfly caught in a spiderweb. Shattered stained glass windows. Three legged dogs. A black eye on your best friend.There isn't an easy comparison for the dire, wounded poise of this record, a secret pact between beauty and fear. The songs are pensive and worry-stained, all minimal, bluntly entrancing riffs, insistent drumming, and tense, reverberant synthesizers. The futuristic propulsion of Kraftwerk filtered through the raw-knuckled roughness of Suicide?Surprisingly, the most disquieting aspect of the songs is their subtle charm; thirteen tracks of dazed and charged near-collapse that unexpectedlycatch in your mind, echoing their haunted buzz for days and weeks after the record ends. Not since The Silver Apples has a band so successfully wedded a cacophony of electronic keyboards with such a clear-voiced pop sensibility.A significant part of this catchiness lies in the vocals, in the floating, hypnotic lilt of Indra Dunis and in the timeless, intuitive harmonies lent by Eric Landmark and Dave Broekema. The weave of their raw, upright voices lends a poignant, unflinching and steady guide to the dogged, swirling waves of sound that propels the record. Amid the tumultuous, irresistible waves of sound that drives the last minutes of the record, the entire world seems to fall away in the face of these brave, almost spiritual voices asking, "what happened to you, what happened to me?"Such ache, such urgency; Numbers draw a line from the honest clarity of traditional American music like the Carter Family through the troubled pounding of today, creating a phenomenal, appropriately dark vision of tomorrow's pop music. - Ethan Swan

• Format: CD
• Genre: Rock