Pitchfork

Rahim's debut EP came out just last year, but to hear their follow-up LP, you'd think it's been a decade-- one pinioned with a handful of albums comprising a logical developmental arc between the two. Ideal Lives sounds like a much older band's record played with a younger band's chutzpah. While retaining the EP's inchoate sound-- the clangorous mid-tempo guitars, incantatory vocals, and chiseled rhythms-- it's much poppier, more subtle, and subdued than its predecessor. Rahim's 1990s-style post-punk now traffics in airy lilt more than scraping ironclad drag; the same serrated dirge is infused with a weightless bounce. It's as if J. Robbins had skipped directly from from Jawbox's early Dischord albums to the more restrained Burning Airlines, or maybe what Q and Not U would have done had they stuck around for a few more years.

Robbins did in fact produce this album, an ideal choice. Not only does Rahim owe a stylistic debt to Robbins' bands, his production style-- unfettered yet nuanced, with slightly fuzzy rhythm guitars, full-bodied bass, and crisply shimmering drums-- complements the restraint of the songwriting, holding each of its components in its own glittering suspension. Throughout the album, thick cords of elastic bass intertwine with silvery filaments of guitar. Droning calls and distorted responses drift up in hypnotic litanies. Sinuous keys diffuse through the burnt-out, hulking framework of the percussion. Concise drum breakdowns section off the music like a flexible grid. Each song pursues its individual character within the gestalt: "10,000 Horses", with its lightly slashing guitars and rolling beat, actually gallops like a horse, with grace, power, and control. "Desire" builds and breaks tension by juxtaposing sections of rumbling bass, careening guitar and loping drums with a staccato bump and eerie falsettos. And "Forever Love" is a straight pop song, with its dreamy vocals and idyllic, gently pinwheeling glide, although there's still a stabby breakdown in the middle of this scattering dandelion fluff, lest we forget what we're listening to.

But what makes Rahim unique isn't their overall style; it's the tiny yet indispensable songwriting flourishes that lodge obdurately in the memory. It's how the step-by-step vocal line of "KlangKlangKlang" is mirrored by a twinkling chain of guitar notes; the mournful brass section that sounds like an old soul sample; the dark wave of bass and compressed drums that rolls in after a fillip of perfectly-placed hand percussion. It's the two brisk handclaps that launch "Something From an Amputee" into a cascade of chimes. It's the stutter at the end of the fluid organ phrase on "Only Pure", and the sparse cowbell reverberating through the astral harmonies. It's the Dismemberment Plannish organ whiz near the end of "Forever Love", and the gym-class whistle piercing the martial murk of "Shut Off the Light". It's Rahim's exquisite attention to counterintuitive detail, revivifying a genre that's been teetering on the verge of depletion for years.