( )

iTunes Review

Face it: She's never coming back. Yet here you are again for the fifth Friday in a row — caught in a stasis, as paralyzed as someone who just saw a ghost. Which is exactly how ( ) starts and stays for five tracks and nearly 30 glacial minutes, sparking a song cycle of denial and acceptance that's as gorgeous and grand as it is dire and debilitating. A breakup album in the most untraditional sense, it plays out like the plot of an independent movie with major studio backing, leaving everything up to the imagination with a nonlinear progression of disembodied phrases ("you sat along the fire," "you suffer, alone," both of which are repeated nonsensically throughout the record) and crystalline sound (the lonely ping of an elongated piano chord, the brushing and crashing of cymbals, the complete cacophony of tension-releasing riffs). By the time the eighth and final untitled track careens and climaxes, the effect is like being chased by a serial killer — one close enough to poke and prod, but not quick slice, the skin — only to be saved at the last second by some sort of intervening hope. In other words, it's a thrill ride from start to end, even during its slowest, most alien moments.