This Is the Third Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank

There's a wondrous sense of duality about the sound of Adebisi Shank. While the Irish trio's frantic math rock is executed with a kind of robotic precision, there's something oddly human about it. On their bluntly titled third album, This Is the Third Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank, the band weaves a series of instrumental jams into what can only be described as highly controlled chaos. Taken individually, each track is like a tiny explosion of joy and hope, as if a computer were asked to reinterpret "Ode to Joy" based on a mix of music theory and the film Die Hard. When all these pieces are strung together, the listener is exposed to something altogether more epic. As This Is the Third Album... moves from track to track, a sense of urgency begins to arise out of the music, as if the album has a secret that it's just dying to tell you. It's this feeling that makes Adebisi Shank so much more approachable than a lot of other math rock bands. Where projects like Don Caballero seemed as if they were trying to create impenetrable math problems, Adebisi Shank seem more welcoming. Rather than mask their humanity behind layers of synthesizers and music theory, the bandmembers use those elements to explore it. And much like the classic sci-fi trope of the robot that wants to understand "what is love?," This Is the Third Album... has a certain charm about it that makes it easy to empathize with despite its inscrutably mechanical nature, making for an engrossing and inviting listen capable of brightening up most any day with its synthetic ebullience.