FRAMES

I'm sorry, but some of the songs on this album sound as if two or three old tracks that had been laying around from previous years were (rather badly) spliced together ("Savant," "Only Twin," "Sleeping Dogs and Dead Lions," and "Voorhees," ) and the best song on the album, "Trail of Fire" (the only five-star song, IMHO), has some rather incongruous and innocuous sections to it. Gone are melody, variety, and experimentation (unless you want to call venturing further into the land of dissonance and repetition 'experimental') of "Everyone into Position;" here are a harder edge and more dissonance. There's even a song or two I hope to never hear again in this lifetime ("Sleeping Dogs and Dead Lions" and "The Frame"). I still love (the concept of) the drummer who hates to play in straightforward time signatures, the repetitive math rock guitar arpeggios are still catchy (if played ad nauseum), but something like 'charm' or 'charisma' is missing from this album. There is a lot of music on this album--the nine songs average about eight and a half minutes each--but much of it fails to engage and win me over--especially as they 'develop' into either noise and cacaphony or repetition like Chinese water torture. Good, I guess, but not great or even excellent.