THERAPY?

American fans could be forgiven for thinking THERAPY? had taken their vestigial question mark and headed off into the alt-rock sunset years ago. But the band's been at it this whole time, and "Crooked Timber", their tenth studio album, is one feral, cranky beast indeed. Co-produced by Andy Gill of GANG OF FOUR, it's a noisy, blatting squall heavy on the bass guitar and dripping by turns with sardonic bitterness and surprising pathos.

When I say "heavy on the bass guitar," I don't mean the record has some respectable low-end; I mean they made the bass louder than the guitar! It's an odd production choice, but it ends up adding an off-kilter, slightly menacing tone to even the most accessible tracks on "Crooked Timber". The guitar accents and embellishes the driving, churning bass lines, with a highly-wound snare clanging through the mix and Andy Cairns's mostly unadorned vocal wandering through the clangor. The overall effect seems to pull a page from the playbook of everyone from BARKMARKET to JAWBOX to KILLING JOKE to JESUS LIZARD, but still retains enough of the teeth-grinding paranoia and liverish eye on society that THERAPY? are known for even at their most commercially palatable.

The heaviest, starkest tracks work best — from the punishing, swirling "Clowns Galore" to the naked and emotional "I Told You I Was Ill", to the angular, crawling "Bad Excuse For Daylight". Really, every track is a keeper, with the possible exception of droning ten-minute instrumental "Magic Mountain" (why banish the perfectly harrowing "Bad Excuse For Daylight" to live after such a meandering throwaway?). The THERAPY? stock in trade — intelligent, dark-hearted, infused with gallows humor and a sighing pessimism — comes through, though, and after a few listens, the instrumentation begins to make perfect sense. Indeed, you wouldn't want these bleak, arch post-millennial anthems any other way. Import-only for the States at the moment, but well worth seeking out.