do you love the color of the sky?: clarity, and what it costs

Clarity is a risk, and the Los Angeles quartet take it. do you love the color of the sky? is the first of their records where the songs sit on top of the sound instead of under it: drum machines that hit harder, guitar tones with depth in them, Emma Maatman's voice out front rather than threading around the edges. Everything is legible, which is the achievement, and in a few places the price.

Their debut, Mandatory Enjoyment, came out in 2021 and spent most of its runtime avoiding the obvious. Fissured Ceramics, track two on that record, is a fair measure of it: clipped tremolo, driving drums, guitars layered into a blur, two voices intertwining because neither was willing to lead. Free Energy followed in 2024 with something more concentrated and more accessible, and still sounded like a band measuring its range. The Stereolab comparison that stuck early was never wrong, just tired. What has moved is where the melody sits. Nathan O'Dell's leads used to be the thing the vocal wound around. Here the arrangements get built for Maatman, and her phrasing sets the pace before anything else does.

Out October 22 on Polyvinyl, their first for the label, it sounds like a band who got a budget and spent it where it shows. They produced, recorded and mixed it with Joo-Joo Ashworth, and the mix is the first thing you notice: nothing smeared, room around everything. Mikey Young mastered it. Maatman did the layout, Linden Gledhill shot the sleeve. The limited pressing carries a second disc, dronus disc, ten drone versions of the ten tracks, which is either a gift for the converted or a note about where their instincts still live, and probably both.

April Limousine opens it and is dance music first: a glitchy trip-hop pulse, synths holding their shine while the guitars elbow in, Maatman's alto riding the top. The album's title arrives inside that song as a question, and the next nine tracks answer it without ever saying yes outright. Full Spectrum Dominance, the lead single, is the widest thing here, guitars piling up until the sound goes multicoloured and loud.

Squeaky Wheel is the argument, and at six minutes and change it earns it: a vocal that takes the song clean away from the guitars, and a line about hurting a fly that lands harder than it should. Touch the Perfect Speed does more with less, one question about how much longer repeated until it stops being a question.

Omen Globe asks what you want and leaves it there. N of 1 is the other peak, built toward a vocal moment the rest of the side cannot come down from. Heaven's What You Make of It closes with Maatman thinned to a lilt and the band turning the volume down without turning the lights off. C.B.B.S.I.M.M.P.W.M. is the one cut that behaves like a note instead of a song.

If you played Free Energy and wanted the guitars louder and the melodies nearer the front, this is the record you asked for. It sits with dream pop that can play, with the krautrock end of their record shelf, with trip-hop that keeps grit in it. Fennesz is a name worth keeping in a corner rather than the centre: the texture is still here, it just is not the point any more. Anyone who came for the drift should go straight to dronus disc.

What holds it at good rather than better is the tidying. Two records of learning how to make a mess, and this one sweeps up after itself. Song of Mana is where the bill shows: a long track at the same length as the best thing on the record, where guitars and machines circle without either committing, and the melody that should pin it down stays out of reach. The drone disc runs the same problem in reverse, ten versions of ten ideas with the songs taken out.

Three and a half, then. The playing, the mix and the voice are the best they have been, and on Squeaky Wheel and N of 1 the writing catches up and the whole thing lifts. Elsewhere the band are in very good light and still deciding what to do with it. This is the cleanest they have sounded. They have sounded stranger.

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