**1/2 Quickspace

PRECIOUS FALLING

(Parasol)

The trick to krautrock -- and to any pop music built on repetition -- is making the listener listen more carefully with each beat. Just as your eye sees hubcaps rotating backwards at some speeds, your ear fills in the spaces between the sounds -- provided the spaces are interestingly shaped.

Precious Falling, the second US release by Quickspace, has one foot firmly in the krautrock camp of Neu! and Faust, and on tracks like "Quickspace Happy Song #2" or "Coca Lola" they weave patterns in beguiling and energetic fashion. Later, on "Hadid" and "Walk Me Home," the band -- led by former Faith Healers frontman Tom Cullinan -- try their hand at pomo reassembling, cutting up the riffs into smaller and smaller pieces. It's less effective than the bash and pop of "Happy Song," but maybe that's because you can't sense the band rocking -- and blissing -- out behind their instruments.

Much of the rest of the album owes more to the Velvet Underground and Low than to Stereolab or Tangerine Dream. Quickspace also have a way with an ominous shuffle -- as on the album opener, "Death + Annie" -- and, ably aided by the second guitar and vocals of Nina Pascale, the dreamy, sleepy ballad. Somehow they manage to knit together the thumping with the wispy, and Precious Falling holds together.

-- Ben Auburn