Males

The Intelligence’s musical trajectory might chart in the same way as the stock market has in the last decade: a jagged red line ascending and descending into a zone of primordial noise and weirdness, a blue line careening wildly in and out of a familiar sector of finely focused post-punk. On Males, Lars Finberg steers clear of the red zone: fans may not recognize Finberg as the force at work on tunes like the tidied up, bouncy “The Universe” (originally a fuzzy, crackling ditty on Boredom and Terror), or the downright plucky “White Corvette,” where Finberg’s vocals are bright and friendly. Males’ favored backdrop on most songs are palettes of open space rather than staticky noise, the guitars are clean and sharp — lo-fi is definitely not the order of the day. The Wire-y, one minute blast of “Bong Life,” the brilliantly warped, keening guitars on “Tuned to Puke,” and the D.N.A. twitch of “Sailor Itch” have more gleaming edge than Intelligence fans are accustomed to; it’s a great turn of events, one that allows a song like the (re-visited) garage thumper “Like Like Like Like Like Like Like” to really plant itself firmly in your cerebral mass.