Cloud Control, Bliss Release
Folky and rustic yet also coolly Eels-ish. There’s an eerie emptiness, even a scariness, to how the sweet backing voices drift in and around the rough lead vocals. Then the guitars come in and everything goes hauntingly haywire. Some of the rhythms are African, in a controlled Paul Simon Graceland manner, which some will enjoy (“Gold Canary” earns a commercially minded two-minute remix on the album’s bonus EP), but personally I’m more taken by tracks like “The Rolling Stones,” which seems to roll all musics of the 1960s—from Velvet Underground to Nilsson to Mamas and Papas and yes, the Stones—into four knock-out minutes of all-natural mind expansion.