TAKE CARE, TAKE CARE, TAKE CARE

Two years after its release the latest album by the celebrated Austin, Texas quartet still hasn't attracted much attention in these pages, despite being arguably their best effort yet. No new ground was broken here, but the group continues to mature, building their panoramic Post Rock epiphanies with a little more variety in style than usual, and showing a better developed sense of nuance as well.

The music as usual presents a dynamic contrast between serenity and noise, but this time around the balance is more organic and the transitions much smoother. "Be Comfortable, Creature" (I'd love to know how they invent such evocative titles) opens with a delicate moodiness worthy of early GENESIS, gradually lifted into the big skies of West Texas on an updraft of laser beam guitar sustain recalling a young Robert Fripp enjoying a Rio Grande vacation. Two tracks later the album closer "Let Me Back In" offers a quintessential EitS apotheosis, but with an atypically swinging rhythm underneath.

Those huge, booming drums are still an acquired taste, in songs like "Trembling Hands" and "Last Known Surroundings" all but obliterating the adjoining frequencies. Maybe there wasn't another way for percussionist Chris Hrasky to compete against the wall of sound generated by three electric guitarists, but the album improves when the production exercises more restraint, as in "Postcard From 1952" or the gentle waltz-like intro to "Human Qualities".

There continues to be something attractively transcendental about this band and its music: an unspoken striving toward the empyrean light of whatever plateau you choose to recognize as heaven. As suggested by their collective moniker the experience is often beautiful, bright, and very loud, animated by an eloquence sometimes lacking in the music of kindred Post Rockers with a similar agenda. This collection of six songs, four years in the making (and worth every minute of the wait), brings them one step closer to paradise.