Click on artwork to purchase CD

Despite the aesthetically consonant pop sweetness in The Ladybug Transistor's fourth full-length album, the sum of the parts is dark and gloomy – and that's always been the group's greatest strength. Sweet on the surface, eerie on the inside. Hey, who says pop can't be bi-polar?

Never guilty of overplaying or false emotional exaggeration, The Ladybug Transistor teases the listener with great restraint, the pace controlled and the powerful group energy harnessed by Gary Olson's deep, shifty vocals that seem to flip from depressing to uplifting and back again at the snap of a finger. Sasha Bell sings on a few of the perkier tracks like "The Places You'll Call Home" and "Hangin' on the Line" – refreshing changes of pace from the rest of the album's melancholy trot. Bouncier tunes like "A Burial at Sea" and "Please Don't Be Long" balance well with the heavy-hearted opening tracks, and the band couldn't have picked a more appropriate song to cover than Jackie DeShannon's "Splendor in the Grass."

The constant mood swings – a quality that the group continues to hone with each release – might have to do with the change of recording location from Olson's Malborough Farm Studios (where the first three albums were recorded) to the vacation shitbed known as Tucson. Whatever they were up to during the recording process, it worked, and The Ladybug Transistor has successfully created the musical equivalent of a subdued scream, a 13-track disc of hidden beauty that will surely get any indie rocker indie-rocking out. You can see them for yourself, live and in person, on November 7 at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. If you're into that sort of thing. - Erik Fong