Since the careening, ragged followed the hazy, dreamlike , each album had an element of a surprise, offering something different than what came before. That's not the case with , which refines and polishes the blueprint of . This is as slow and ballad-heavy as , but where that album was filled with raw emotion and weird detours, is tasteful and streamlined. It offers no weighty themes and is emotionally removed. With their layered, low-key production, seem hell-bent on leaving behind anything that could be construed as their signature sound, so keyboards and drum machines are pushed to the front as 's guitar strums instead of jangles and ' background vocals are buried in the mix under 's double-tracked harmonies. All the quirks in the production have been sanded down and glossed over. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine