A rock & roll open secret: care very much about what other people say about them. Ever since they hit the big time in 1987 with , every album is a response to the last -- rather, a response to the response, a way to correct the mistakes of the last album: erased the roots rock experiment , straightened out the fumbling , and 2009's is a riposte to the suggestion they played it too safe on 2004's . After recording two new cuts with for the '06 compilation and flirting with reunited with and (here billed as "Danny" for some reason), who not only produced but pointed the group toward aural architecture on . Much like , which were largely recorded with their first producer, , this is a return to the familiar for , but where their LPs are characterized by muscle, the / records are where the band take risks, and so it is here that attempts to recapture that spacy, mysterious atmosphere of and then take it further. Contrary to the suggestion of the clanking, sputtering first single -- its riffs and "Pump It Up" chant sounding like a cheap mashup stitched together in -- this isn't a garish, gaudy electro-dalliance in the vein of . Apart from a stilted middle section -- the hamfisted white-boy funk and the not-nearly-as-bad-as-its-title anthem ; tellingly, the only three songs here to not bear co-writing credits from -- is all austere grey tones and midtempo meditation. It's a record that yearns to be intimate but don't do intimate, they only do majestic, or as sings on one of the albums best tracks, they do Here, as on strike that unmistakable blend of soaring, widescreen sonics and unflinching openhearted emotion that's been their trademark, turning the intimate into something hauntingly universal. These songs resonate deeper and longer than anything on , their grandeur almost seeming effortless. It's the rest of the record that illustrates how difficult it is to sound so magnificent. With the exception of that strained middle triptych, the rest of the album is in the vein of only quieter and unfocused, with its ideas drifting instead of gelling. Too often, the album whispers in a murmur so quiet it's quite easy to ignore -- an adaptation of a traditional folk tune, and its verses not much more than a recitation, simmer so slowly they seem to evaporate -- but at least these poorly defined subtleties sustain the hazily melancholy mood of . When , and push too hard -- the ill-begotten techno-speak overload of the sound sculpture of -- the ideas collapse like a pyramid of cards, the confusion amplifying the aimless stretches of the album, turning it into a murky muddle. Upon first listen, seems as if it would be a classic grower, an album that makes sense with repeated spins, but that repetition only makes the album more elusive, revealing not that went into the studio with a dense, complicated blueprint, but rather, they had no plan at all. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine