Pitchfork

Only 70% or so of Prinzhorn Dance School's debut album is made up of music. The rest is...well, it's hard to say. What do you call the space in a song that lingers between the guitar parts, vocals, and beats? It's not exactly empty space, since it takes on properties that change according to sounds in the surroundings. And it's not "negative space" as plied by sculptors, whose hold on nothingness needn't account for fluctuations in drama brought about by time. So what do we call this space, then? Is it material, immaterial? Is it music?

Questions like this rise out of Prinzhorn Dance School whether you want them to or not. For one thing, the album is extraordinarily sparse-- calling the instrumentation a simple mix of guitar, bass, and drums doesn't get to the half of it. In fact, "half of" the sound you might expect from such a lineup is more than transpires in a song like "Black Bunker". Centering on a simple two-note bass riff, the song lurches through a series of sudden guitar pricks and distended drums that materialize out of nowhere and vanish completely in a matter of seconds. It's a foreshortened blast of rock minimalism, more pent-up than even the Fall or Wire (two old bands who figure heavily in Prinzhorn Dance School's sound). And over it all, anxious vocals suggest that the "Black Bunker" itself is nothing more than an apartment in which "You're scratching and itching/ Trying to break on through?/ Or hanging round my kitchen?"

A similar sense of confused routine creeps into "Do You Know Your Butcher", repeatedly raising its title question while depicting a shop where "There's blood on the hands/ Fur on the floor/ Meat/ The smell of fresh loaves and pennies." It plays like a Don DeLillo supermarket scene as distilled in the language of Mark E. Smith. For all their debts to the Fall, though, the duo behind Prinzhorn Dance School traffic less in anger and indignation than in creepy evocations of the mundane: In their songs, everything simple is weird and conspicuous. One typical missive commands "Don't Talk to Strangers" for fear that "they'll find out who you are." Another fixates on "Eat, Sleep" before declaring, with a chirpy, deranged certainty, "there are monsters... in the deep."

The name Prinzhorn Dance School alludes to Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist and art historian who published a book in 1922 called Artistry of the Mentally Ill. It's hard not to relate the elder Prinzhorn's work-- and the knowing analysis of "outsider art" it fostered-- to songs so mannered and strange. But what could have been a mere exercise by a band angling to make a point plays out more as a sort of exorcism. Part of the album's power owes to the unerring discipline of the sound: Even in a comparatively busy song like "You Are the Space Invader", Prinzhorn Dance School rock hardest by way of restraint, with vocal interjections closely miked to capture chilling bits of mania and instrumental parts left dry and dark for the sake of atmosphere. The space in the mix owes to DFA producer/engineer James Murphy, whose work here falls closer to his past as a protégé of Steve Albini than to his present as a disco-rock don.

However meticulously arranged it sounds, Prinzhorn Dance School owes more of its effect to the moody interplay of the band itself. Coming off as both magically attuned and profoundly alone, Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn-- a pair of artists from Brighton, England-- bait each other like two sides of the same brain. It plays out as much in certain interlocking instrumental passages as it does in stripped-down vocal harmonies that allude to hooks without straining for them. Prinzhorn songs abound with the kind of scattered beauty that rises out of old classics by Young Marble Giants. But they're darker and more pointed-- manic flashes from a conflicted brain that keep the line between the perceptive and the unhinged obscure.