A Lot Like Birds are an anomaly. To wrap one’s head around the myriad influences and overarching grasp of musicality channeled into their offerings would be like trying to qualify the brilliant syntactical and contextual fusion of something like Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry” which, as a composition, seems an apt metaphor for what this band really does with their second full-length album, Conversation Piece. Realistically, though, to avoid drawing too much analysis from the hyperbolic characterization of the breadth of this band’s sound, it is worth noting that Conversation Piece was produced by Kris Crummett, whose credits include Dance Gavin Dance, Fear Before…, and Closure In Moscow—that fact alone should give any prospective listener some inkling of ALLB’s overall musical direction.

Starting with “Orange Time Machines Care,” an overtly math-y and overly “7/8” number that runs the gamete between groovy and dissonant, the album comports itself with a pulsating sense of nuance, undulating between the straightforward and the progressive, yet managing to double back and re-address each tenet, each respective groove and chord, throughout. The second track on the album, “Think Dirty Out Loud,” is just as math-and-groove-oriented as its predecessor, offering a bit of driving-yet-technical drumming and the super-infectious and literary refrain, “I’ve got a pocket full of dark, black pick-up lines that I want to spill down the well of your throat.”

The rest of the album proceeds in a similar fashion, with varying feels and time signatures, spoken or speak-screamed speech with cutesy, pseudo-poetic rhyme schemings (á la mewithoutYou or La Dispute), pedal effects that range from swarming to atmospheric, soaring, well-executed clean vocals, and some of the most prolifically-talented, tasteful technical drumming to appear on any release this year. Drummer Joe Arrington’s polyrhythmic capacities borrow from southern, “shed”-styled gospel drumming and his technical prowess offers competition for the likes of Mike Portnoy, Thomas Pridgen, and some of the more skillful drummers around the music scene today.

While Conversation Piece is an amalgam of anything and everything present in alternative music today, there are many unique pieces and sections of this musical compendium that manage to gleam through the noise and further excite. For example, there are occurrences of Latin and world percussion—such as marimba (“The Blowtorch Is Applied To The Sugar”), shaker, and congas (“What Didn’t Kill Me Just Got Stronger”)—as well as elements of free jazz. While all of these things make for an entrancing piece of composition, it’s a pity that A Lot Like Birds have emerged in the shakiness of the contemporary music industry, meaning that a band like this might have to work extremely hard to find their niche; their experimentation juts them out into the progressive territory of Mars Volta or Dreamtheater, yet their hardcore tendencies might relegate them to the realm of Protest The Hero. These are not necessarily bad things but they could limit this still-evolving band. What if they’re too hardcore for the progressive crowd but too progressive for the hardcore crowd? We’ll let A Lot Like Birds worry about that one; they seem to have a hold of everything else, already.

★★★.5/★★★★★

*This review was composed by Paul Adler