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Review by Ned Raggett, All Music Guide

For their third album, the Weird Weeds find themselves in their brightest spot yet musically -- it's not that their earlier efforts are dark downers per se, but from the flair of the opening drum roll and sweet blended vocals of Sandy Ewen and Aaron Russell on "You Drive Me Crazy," it's as if the trio members took their gently unsettled psych backgrounds and thought, "Let's play to the crowd some." The short 14-song effort therefore works as both a stand-alone listen and an interesting step forward, a forthright, almost brawling album at points (consider the abbreviated instrumental blast of "Save the Dogs") that still has an air of understated mystery and fragmentation, songs that are just as long as they need to be but no more. A song like "Lies" captures the balance at play excellently, the feedback scraping (and not much else) of the verses contrasted with a surging, near-triumphant chorus, even while a crackle of nervous noise continues to play under the measured full-band rollick. That interplay between the three players is something you can almost sense from their work -- Nick Hennies' drumming in particular is a marvel of deftness, with his fills and additions around silent arrangements as important as a full crash and bash, as can be heard on both "A Goose" and "Hold in the Light," the latter featuring a soft keening vocal from him as well. Songs like the title track -- Ewen's voice matching a descending guitar line and then softly meshing with a gentle band breakdown before repeating the whole process -- have a calm, fragile, and almost fractured beauty, as does the extended midsection of "Sorry Rain," the album's lengthiest song, with its hiss of distant noise that sounds like something between rainfall and soft feedback as a soft, varying acoustic figure plays over and again. Yet perhaps the most striking moment occurs on "Atlas," as a surprisingly lush ebb and flow of a processed accordion part becomes a majestic orchestral swell.