WITHOUT WAVES

Exactly five years on from the release of their excellent "Lunar" debut, WITHOUT WAVES are in an uncompromising mood. "Good Grief" kicks off the Chicagoan quartet's second album with a flurry of machine-gun riffs and cudgeling, syncopated beats, and the impact is undeniable. When the song takes a peculiar detour through dubbed-out post-rock before exploding again with even more unhinged intensity, this band's subversive streak is writ large across every note. You might even call WITHOUT WAVES a progressive metal band, were it not for the fact that no prog metal band has ever sounded like this before. Songs like "Animal Kingdom" and ".algorithm" are unashamedly extreme and often fiendishly complex, but they also refuse to be rendered monotonous through mindless aggression. On "Animal Kingdom", haunting melodies rise up from the multi-limbed battery of riffs and dissonance; on ".algorithm", the fractious, blast-peppered groove that drives things along recedes midway through and nudges open a door into noirish, FAITH NO MORE-esque territory.

Ultimately, you could tie yourself in knots trying to pin WITHOUT WAVES down to a particular subgenre or sound. At their most epic and exploratory, they sound like they are having an obscene amount of fun: "Set & Setting" is an outrageous, seven-minute maze of great riffs, evocative dissonance and mellifluous vocal harmonies, all expertly blended for maximum theatrical effect, while "Do What Scares You" is a feast of bug-eyed macabre and mechanistic pounding with a tripped-out, psychedelic center. Most startling of all, "Sleight in Shadows" begins with sumptuous vocal harmonies that seem to promise the arrival of some wildly accessible prog tune, before a brutal, berserk torrent of fire and brimstone breaks the spell. When that opening vocal riff returns at the song's end, skimming along the surface of WITHOUT WAVES' eerily precise collective attack, it's a sublime and audacious moment to savor. In contrast, both the gently meandering "Day 15" and shimmering shoegaze waltz "Worlds Apart" demonstrate that this band can be masters of restraint, too.

They reinforce the point with slow-build closer "Seven": a simply magnificent, multi-part prog epic that builds and evolves with RUSH-like authority and just a hint of insanity.

The world needs more music as liberated and fearless as this. Smart, original and intermittently nasty enough to knock your teeth out, "Comedian" is no laughing matter.