Ava Luna – Electric Balloon

Day Dream is the brash, unapproachable gatekeeper to Ava Luna’s third LP Electric Balloon. With Carlos Hernandez’s coos and yelps returning to the fore, this New York quintet’s record is a jumbled, musty garage of songs, angular and cobwebbed and impossible to second-guess.

If you can swallow that spiky intro, the dimly lit blues of Crown or the smooth soul vocal on Prpl might counteract the acidity of more challenging moments like Hold U’s staccato discordance or the unresolved hesitancy of Genesee. Plain Speech, for all its funk and experimentation, even hearkens back to the poppier aspects of Weezer’s debut, proving – like the album as a whole – that Ava Luna’s multifarious work refuses to tessellate.

Like Ice Level before it, Electric Balloon is a structurally uncooperative and fussily heterogenous record, but they’ve dialled down the melody to something sparser, more pugnacious, and ultimately more uncomfortable.