What happened? Their last album 'Four Great Points' was an amazing piece of work - but they apparently decided that they needed to sing on their latest album 'Anahata', which I haven't been able to listen to all the way through in one sitting yet because I find it so grating. Ugh. The background...when a band names itself after a series of letters by author Henry Miller to his wife June and his subsequent affair with the writer Anais Nin, you can guess you're in for a bit of a dense time. Mix that with a smattering of often impenetrable lyrics stumbling from "marginal despiration" to nautical themes like a "mutiny of pirates" to phrases repeated like a sacred mantra: "take down your heart", "sharks and sailors", or "stern and starboard / port and bow". Toss in a musical montage that sounds like what would happen if composers Gorecki and Bartok got together and decided to start rock band built upon layered repetitive guitar structures with complex rhythms. If you could find your way down that sinuous path and not get lost, you'd be in June of 44's lair.

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