AIRS ABOVE YOUR STATION

Studio album number three from the coolest band in the Pacific Northwest is arguably their best, especially for new listeners open to a creative blend of Eno-inspired ambient nuance and grungy Post Rock noise. This is a group capable of making beautiful music when necessary, but their default position is Loud.

That dynamic contrast is exploited right from the start, in the almost ten-minute album opener "Steve's Basement": a powerful Sludge Rock anthem building a furious head of fuzzed-out guitar steam from a single throbbing bass line and a sympathetic drone. The relative subtlety and restraint of the even longer "Schedule For Using Pillows & Beanbags" (the hilarious song titles are a Kinski signature) likewise yields to an imminent Krautrock frenzy, cued by a drummer with enough discipline and precision to make the ghost of Klaus Dinger turn green with envy.

The only vocals on the album are a few barely audible spoken words from bass player Lucy Atkinson, in the aptly-named punk thrash "Rhode Island Freakout". It's hard to believe the same band (and on the same album) was also responsible for the meditative calm of "I Think I Blew It", and its bookend epilogue "I Think I Blew It (Again)": two matching postcards from Another Green World.

Progressive Rock it ain't, by any definition. But the album still rocks, in a transcendent fashion: often heavy, occasionally not, and with a subversive authority only achieved by veteran rebels.