In the dictionary of noise music, accessibility means betrayal. Though fans in many subcultures guard their outsider status, in noise this goes beyond garden-variety elitism. The musicians seem to have a bona-fide philosophy: They don't want you to access their songs, so much as they want their songs to access, through blasts of sublimely violating force, you. And for a certain demographic-- walled spiritually inside mall-laden suburbia or blocks of cubicles-- brutality can mean liberty.

The Brooklyn trio Sightings made their name with brutal records and performances that had the ineffable aura of performance art. Loud didn't quite capture it. Four albums in, on 2004's Arrived in Gold, the band's boredom with the noise dogma of volume for volume's sake-- or for the scene's intellectuals, volume as existential statement-- was beginning to show. So they imbued their art with No Wave's seizures and sharp angles, with dance rhythms, clearer mixing, and subtly shaded dynamics. Through the Panama, their sixth album, follows suit.

A mischievous bit of wordplay opens the show, as "a rest" blurs into "arrest." Attention to these distinctions, to little gaps and instabilities, is what separates the old Sightings from the new. A wall of sound left intriguingly half-built, the paranoid "A Rest" falls neatly into the next track, "Debt Depths", the sound of that wall, a nightmarish mosaic of feedback, crumbling into dust. Start to finish, the album's sequencing plays with these tensions. Awash in tribal drums and guitar squeal, suggesting human sacrifice taking place in a junkyard, "Certificate of No Effect" embodies the old Sightings sound. Then the bleakly pretty "Degraded Hours" comes from the opposite angle. Mark Morgan's multitracked whisper blows over distant pianos and cavernous throbs, and in its soothing simplicity, it feels strangely hopeful.

Between these poles lies the title track, a slow-motion explosion of screech and shriek. The song might invoke old Sightings, but it lacks the nervous swagger of "Perforated", which fits themes of transformation into a quintessentially No Wave groove. Quieter, but revealing a debt to the same era, "The Electrician" recasts the Walker Brothers' lush, post-punk 1970s psychodrama as an apocalyptic tale in three acts: hush, blast, hush. The mix lends gravity to each element, from guest-starring Matt Sweeney's chords to Morgan's speak-sing. On par with Samara Lubelski's craftsmanship on Arrived in Gold, the production handiwork of Andrew W.K., the noise stalwart turned avatar of abandon, allows every sound to shine while preserving the grimy, low-gloss vibe.

Without the Dadaist shards of language, without any human voice, the instrumental "Black Peter" evokes a world of machines. We are left mesmerized by the ballet mécanique: the robotic stomp, the shimmying bass line, the slight crests and troughs and hints of melody. The band's been crafting these deceptively chaotic scenes all along, we slowly discover. Sightings may action-paint their canvases with viscous, theatrical brushstrokes, but it's the countless, cunningly placed scrapes and flecks that make Through the Panama vibrate with meaning and real menace.