Gogogo Airheart (3rd)

The second self-titled album by Gogogo Airheart is a nearly uncategorizable mess. And yet, that's not the insult it first appears to be. It's a mess in the way that a lot of the best albums by the Fall are a mess, in that it's an album filled with songs that sound like they were recorded by a constantly shifting group of musicians, to the point that some of the songs barely even sound like the work of the same band. After the cacophonous opener, "In Case of Evidence," the band salutes an obvious influence by recording a respectful cover of the Pop Group's "Trap." Elements of the Pop Group's shared fondness for the most out-there textural elements of dub reggae and Captain Beefheart percolate through the rest of the album, which careens from the squalling guitars and distortion-heavy vocals of "Mutiny (...Remember When?)" to the hypnotic, almost Krautrock-like rush of the nearly pretty "Golden Sundays." Pretty much all that connects these 11 songs is the shared lack of pretentiousness; this is not the work of a band self-consciously attempting to be as weird as possible, but of a group of musicians working to their own, sometimes inscrutable, blueprint.