4 out of 5

Label: Araki

Produced by: Jordan Joshua Chefgros (recorded by, mixed by)

While not necessarily breaking any wholly new ground for instrumental math rock, France’s LAC ∙ gather up, and seamlessly string together, several pieces of the puzzle into a comprehensive whole, never getting lost in the need to forcefully differentiate themselves.

That’s very backhanded – multiple ways of saying “sounds the same to me” – but it’s truly the band’s strength: Yolanda is a sleeper listen, lulling you in with that familiarity and a sort of limited sonic palette while you slowly realize how busy and rocking it is.

The album has a soft recording style: the high-end guitar has a synth-like lightness atop a warm, bubbling bass and flowing drum work; the cleanliness of the combo (and here’s where I pull out the references) is like fellow Frenchers Chevreuil, but structured into Turing Machine momentum, then given a production / mix pass by John McEntire. While my hope is to suggest how LAC ∙ manages to make freewheeling math-rock sound somewhat linear, and poppy, I’m not quite covering how intense it actually can get, with, for example, the wild fretwork and syncopation demands of David Hass, or the post-rock breakdowns of closer Mirador. It’s all kind of blanketed by a willingness to curb the songwriting back towards a center of recognizable riffs and manageable time signatures.

For better or worse, that makes Yolanda an album that doesn’t immediately come to mind when I’m in the mood for something wordless to rock out to, but as I flip through my albums and decide to put it on, once going, its slowburn nature and juggling of several mathy subgenres into one makes it click like nothing else.