Three years after its debut Brighter Than Life, NYC’s Wharton Tiers Ensemble returns with a blast of instrumental modern hard rock catharsis. In the meantime, Tiers tuned the engines of New York noise rides, especially Sonic Youth and side projects. Tiers paints his clamorous, bombastic canvases with broad strokes of hard bop saxophone, a symphonic guitar army, and hard-hitting drums. Rather than clamorous, the mix is big, bold, and brash. This is the new majestic-if-dissonant opus from the man who produced Glenn Branca’s Symphony series on Atavistic. – Tom Schulte