Pitchfork

The Black Swans hereby join the Faint and the Pink Mountaintops in having made short releases (tee-hee) about libidinal matters, but Sex Brain is no vamp-by-numbers affair: The focus is on the grievous awkwardness of physical longing, and of trying to articulate it without sounding macho, merely perverted, desperate, disloyal, or dopey. Bandleader Jerry DiCicca seems to be trying to sidestep the dueling fantasies perpetuated by most hump-hither music, electing to indulge neither the larger-than-sex, overly confident meat-machine approach, nor the sentimental, fluid-free, preemptively nostalgic lovemaker angle. The resulting quest-for-truth middle ground staked out by Sex Brain is, again, plenty awkward. Fans of how 2004's Who Will Walk in the Darkness With You could evoke a restrained, hellish dusk might be well surprised by this disc's spent, tragicomic dawn.

Opener "I Don't Want 2 Fuck" is as upbeat and reticent as these proceedings get. "It's all about me," the speaker admits, seconds before Canaan Faulkner's accordion suggests a sad Fazoli's in Ireland. DeCicca sings about spooning, "getting weird," existential doubt, and the centrality of mouth-holes before the tune is over, in a voice that is just WTF bizarre. Imagine a stoned-but-bookish, seductive Muppet. Imagine a more fragile Tindersticks (Tenderdicks?), or that faux-comic-relief Jewish guy from "Saved By the Bell" if he was a game-spitting mack (The Teaches of Screech?). Either way, this tune stands alongside Naked Raygun's "No Sex", Sold Out's "I Don't Want To Have Sex With You", and Lust Control's entire discography in the canon of nocturnal-restraint advocacy.

"Friends" is sung to a tequila bottle. If you've ever forgotten how you ended up in some depraved scenario, this joint's for thee. Hang on for the verse, "She pulled my pants down/ And said she knows/ My girlfriend." Memory and fidelity are complicated. Which leads to the ex-lover masturbation fantasy, "Your Hands", about olfactory flashbacks and wacking it to Bob Dylan albums, as Noel Sayre's violin weeps and plucks its pubes. "Dark Plums" is essentially an homage to the Black Swans' myspace-approved heroes the Dirty Three, a tension experiment seasoned by Horace Roscoe's eerie saxophone. The lyrics oddly go all metaphorical and euphemistic here, as the references to "juice," "butter," and "jam" clash with the directness elsewhere, as if even DeCicca wanted to buffer the strange fruit cultivated by bedfellows on the verge of trust ("Are we too good of friends to play?"). "My Lips" is a comparably sweet duet with Sara Jurcyk about post-orgasmic ennui. Its refrain, "Never procreate," seems like an emotional prophylactic.

My only previous associations with Columbus, Ohio, are the band Moviola and the novel The Right Man For The Job by Mike Magnuson, in which a dude kills a dog with a cinderblock and his girlfriend sets herself on fire. I did a local band search and found acts named Cleavage and Cameltoe to be recommendable, so maybe the place is throttled with a horndog vibe. While so many borderline smug avant-gardists are creating (self-conscious?) freak-folk, the Black Swans' attempt to freakify standard folk song structure, in terms of both Rick James' appetite for action and in terms of unbowed eccentricity, is welcome and laudable. That such atmospheric talents would take such topically riling chances suggests that this band actively seeks apologists instead of boosters, which is fine by me. More a bodice-tugger or fiddler than a ripper, Sex Brain really satisfices.