3 out of 5

Produced by: Man or Astroman?

Label: Touch and Go

Very interesting.  Not great, per se, but definitely interesting.

With the shift to Touch and Go Records came, for MoA, the slightest shift toward what I’d consider a more Chicago, post-rock sound.  From release to release, they found themselves playing down the surf to varying extents and playing up the riffs.  While this EP features a pretty rip-roaring surf track – Man Made of CO2 – it is otherwise MoA’s most vocal-heavy disc to date, and those songs land square in the flat-sung, rumbling guitar sound of the T&G scene.  Following off of surf-lite instrumental fare, our initial foray into this via Specify Gravity is pretty thrilling and a true original for the band, but by mid-album, the range has been exhausted, and the last three tracks just sort of repeat the disc’s first half, but without any real standout moments.