Anathallo, Canopy Glow

Anathallo don't give away too much of a story. In “Sleeping Torpor,” children hide in a coat rack from a man called “Father”: is he parent or priest, benevolent play partner or menacing monster? In “The River,” a girl washes downstream past felled trees, eroded banks and snagged weeds; is she a leisurely summer swimmer or a corpse in a flood? And in “All the First Pages,” a narrator stumbles upon an odd clipping from a newspaper circa 1979. “An astronaut lost his ring finger to the back of a grain truck,” band members solemnly harmonize over reverbed piano notes and a haze of organ. “And I can't stop thinking about it.” Well, of course you can't stop thinking about it: why in heaven's name would an astronaut have had a farming accident?

Canopy Glow, this Midwestern marching band/freak-folk ensemble's second full-length album, is built to drive meaning-hounds and puzzle-finishers batty. Dazzlingly cryptic and maddeningly obtuse, it's an epic tour through an Americana landscape of tarnished morals and crashed ideals, set in a one-of-a-kind synthesis of pop songcraft, church hymns, folk textures, minimalist cues and modernist tonalities. Some tracks, like “Noni's Field," feature conventional verse-chorus-bridge structures and four-four rhythms; others, like “Cafetorium,” use words as percussive accents to irregular time signatures. Sometimes Anathallo get tangled up in their own unwieldy ambitions: “John J. Audubon,” which tries to link the 19th-century naturalist with a rumination on human consciousness, might have made a better PhD thesis. But once in a while the band comes out and says something. “The fireflies made/ An accidental constellation,” sings Matthew Joynt in “Noni's Field.” Beauty that confuses can't hold a candle to beauty that makes itself understood.