If Cymbals Eat Guitars took a physical journey across America on their debut album, 2009's Why There Are Mountains, their followup takes a leap into the metaphysical and otherworldly. When he's not contemplating the "unobservable scaffolding for planets and stars", frontman Joseph D'Agostino is preoccupied by "memory's strange abbreviation", haunting his characters with pictures and feelings they might rather forget. His prose is dense with imagery (some of it purple as an aubergine: "undulating mirror images of incandescent spires", indeed), and gets ambitiously complex music to match: surprises lie in the way a song will shift direction and dynamic, a melody will twist away from the vocal line, a guitar will apparently detune mid-note. Sometimes prolixity gets the better of the band, rendering the barrage of words and sounds airless and unreadable. But the balance of tension and release in Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name) is expertly managed, while Definite Darkness and The Current bring calm and a note of quiet bliss.