eah, that's what I like to hear. Super-detuned bass, upper-register guitar discord, song structures cribbed from Slint and Polvo, and two singers: one with a deadpan slacker intontation that makes J Mascis sound enthusiastic; the other sporting a deranged falsetto that sounds like Prince after about five shots of Absolut. It's math-rock, it's Chicago, it's the 90 Day Men, one of my favorite bands since I first laid ears on them a couple years back. Across two EPs and 2000's full-length (It(Is)It) Critical Band, the band delivered a harsh gospel of political and interpersonal commentary including "Hey Citronella", one of the single most harrowing tunes I've ever heard. This song (off the 1975-1978-1998 EP) used its spine-tingling intro guitar riff, Stygian bassline, and Brian Case's not-quite-insane-yet-but-getting-there vocal delivery to completely redefine my concept of musical nihilism. It, and the majority of NDM's oeuvre, crystallize the essence of existential dread into juggernauts of sound that give disagreeable indie-solipsists like myself fodder for many a nightmare.

Now forget most of what I just said, because it has precious little to do with To Everybody. If you've read any of this record's dozen other reviews on the the Web, you may have concluded from the lack of comparisons to other bands that it's far more groundbreaking than it actually is. Nevertheless, I think I can explain the average webzine writer's loss for words in the RIYL department: most of the ideas on display in To Everybody derive from long-forgotten British prog acts from the early 70s with names like Henry Cow, Soft Machine, and the National Health. These bands represented the first attempts to fuse musical styles like classical, jazz, and avant-garde into rock contexts, attempts which NDM update with a mix of reverence and practiced nonchalance.

Sonically, this translates into piano. Oodles and oodles thereof. The press release says that To Everybody features "more prominent use of Andy Lansangan's keyboards," but that's kind of like saying the White Stripes feature prominent use of Jack White's guitar. Speaking of which, it wasn't until the fifth or sixth listen that I was able to reliably recall any of the record's guitar riffs, such was the piano's monolithic centrality in the songs. Think Ben Folds Five in terms of the piano's dominant role, but not as a comparison to the sound itself. However, the press release was pretty much on the mark calling To Everybody "dark, brooding, [and] melancholic." If the idea of BFF performing Unwound's Leaves Turn Inside You sounds appealing, that's the pretty much the only indie-comparison I could come up with.

Everything's midtempo to downtempo, and the naked rage that was formerly one of NDM's most distinctive calling cards has been completely supplanted by quiet, breathy contemplation. The lone heavy element that carries over from previous releases is drummer Cayce Key's reverb-drenched heavysticking. His powerful hits along with Rob Lowe's lugubrious basslines act as the band's rhythmic ballast, while Lansangan's piano and Brian Case's vocals glide effortlessly above. The opening track, "I've Got Designs on You", moses along in no particular hurry, building from humble beginnings into fully-realized washes of piano-driven introspection. "Saint Theresa in Ecstasy" follows a similar pattern, rising from a solo bassline into lush, trance-inducing quietcore. "Alligator" gets jazzy in ¾ time, with memorable lyrics and. . . psychedelic vibrato harmonizing?? Damn, didn't see that coming. But the album's highlight is the sixth and final track, "A National Car Crash", an airy ballad in two movements. Case pulls out his best Bowie vocal impression in the first movement, though he manages to fall far short of his inspiration's level of intelligibility. The song then segues into a slightly more upbeat tempo, as Lansangan's layers of mellifluous piano gush like a stream over the restrained rhythm section. All the while Case is warbling on (having abandoned the thin white duke's vocal stylings) about Strangeways, Here We Come and how it relates to some relationship of his. There's probably some really obvious reference that's completely going over my head there, but whatever. The point is, the track owns.

So there you have it: I suppose I could come up with bands that've undergone more drastic between-album metamorphoses, but few have been so natural and so welcome. This album took awhile to grow on me, owing partly to my fealty to the band's previous releases, but I'm listening to it quite frequently now. Every song's a keeper, which is pretty rare in any genre, and it's 40-minute running time renders listener fatigue a non-issue. It's difficult to gauge the irony of the record's title, because while NDM still certainly are not for everybody, this is definitely their most accessible outing yet, if not their best. What's the driving force behind this powerful midwestern quartet that's steadily building up one of the highest-quality canons in indie rock? Personally, I blame Chicago.