Flaschenträger

With its twirling surrealist melodies, bricolage song structure, and adroit rhythmic changes, Maraudeur have made an album suffused with the spontaneity of an art school party that somehow by the end of the night evolved into making a record. The trilling laughs and clinking glasses are transformed into bright synth lines and guitar riffs that are at times wiry and then, sometimes with little warning, hard and angular. Underneath this is the roiling chatter of Devo-funk infused bass and skittish bap-bap-boom drums. Shouty, echo-y vocals, covering a range of topics—some deadly serious, others less so—cap the 4am anything-can-happen-so-what-will-happen-next feel to the entire record.The comparisons to Kleenex/LiLiLPUT are perhaps inevitable, but the band wears this influence lightly as they have on their past releases, picking up with ease where their predecessors left off and always exploring where to go next. This is music that is energetic, that embraces discovery, that is disquieting in the best ways—this is music to stave off the boredom endemic in our post-everything society.-Ben Michaelis