2. Drums And Guns (2007)

Recorded with a production style akin to modern hip-hop (Sparhawk had professed his love for M.I.A.’s Arular a couple years prior), Drums And Guns is initially jarring, the band’s most esoteric work to date, indebted to the practiced restraint of Young Marble Giants, with dollops of the blunt cacophony of Suicide thrown in. Lyrically, it’s as dour and tempestuous as the band have ever been, save the playful respite of “Hatchet.” But the bulk of these tracks ruminate on death, rampant consumerism, and war. “Murderer,” a diffuse mid-tempo number, is a scathing indictment of the use of religion as a justification to kill, while the stuttering “Breaker” contemplates the cold calculus of wartime logic (“The blood just spills and spills/ But here we sit debating math”). The mechanical vocal loops, hand claps, and drum machines lend the album an almost metronomic efficiency, as if it’s paralleling the desensitized automation of a soldier’s march. The album’s final track, the funereal, pipe organ-swathed “Violent Past,” finds Sparhawk ambivalently questioning, “Maybe it’s the violet path/ Maybe it’s your violent past.” He never reconciles this conundrum, unsure if he’s wandering into rapture or purgatory.