Aluminum Group

PELO

(Hefty)

Frank and John Navin, the two brothers at the core of Chicago's Aluminum Group, are finished with the lounge/exotica revival that came and went in the '90s and that they sometimes found themselves thrown in with. Or at least that's what their fourth album seems to suggest. Here the brothers leave behind the sugary pop confections of their 1998 Plano, embracing instead a chilly, electronic synth-pop redolent of 21st-century anxiety and at least partly in keeping with the Windy City's post-rock underground. "Tom of Finland (An Homage)" paints an unsettling picture of AIDS-era sex-as-science: "Are his blue-green microbes teaming exponential/In the waters of my eyeballs and my skin?" On "Good-Bye Goldfish, Hi Piranha," Mekon Sally Timms sings of a lover expecting cocaine but getting flour. Throughout, producer John Herndon of Tortoise builds on the futuristic sheen that had already begun to cover the organic tapestries Jim O'Rourke helped Aluminum Group weave on their previous album, Pedals. And though the blissful Bacharachian melodicism of their earlier work has all but disappeared, Herndon's sumptuous sonic detailing and the Navins' sly hooks keep Pelo from sinking into a Joy Division depression.

-- Mikael Wood