By far their best imo. They mostly (but far from completely) abandon the boringpop ballad style, and when the vocals agree to fit the style they work best. You end up with very nice, lush, post-rocky stuff with vocals that sounds great. 4-6 are in that style, followed by a ballad track but that works here because it brings variation instead of the whole album being like that. 8 continues that for a touch too long but then become a really nice track with beautiful desperation in the second half of the track, and the song displays the two sides of the coin I'm talking about here. Unfortunately the album end reverts back to their style I don't dig much for 9, 10, and the first half of the long closer, bringing the LP down a couple points for sure. The second half of 11 is full on ambient without vocals and it is very nice. I wish they had done the same for 2, where the intro sounds like a knob demo and is instrumentally very nice, but where I wish the vox weren't there. Still a nice track. 1 is one of their best, with lovely intro textures and nice processing of vocals which gives them some flavour. 3 is a typical track that should have no vox because they clearly are out of place. All in all I'm still not a fan of the band, but this is a much stronger album. 3.6
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