nto the glass of Creature Comforts, Black Dice pours the blissful beeping of Beaches & Canyons over the art-gallery cool rocks of Miles Of Smiles with a splash of tropical guitar for flavour. These ingredients are shaken into a fresh cocktail that will quench a traveller’s thirst while perhaps stirring a few tipsy hallucinations along the way.

Largely eschewed are the discordant moments of noise that would occasionally flare up like hives, as on Beaches & Canyons, for Creature Comforts is generally a more smooth skinned, ambient entity, whose frolicking textures bubble rather than boil. Also worthy of note is Creature Comforts predominantly electronic nature. The first few sips reveal a simple bleached guitar arpeggio surrounded by warm electronics that gurgle, pop and hiss like flowing lava. “Treetops” has an almost luow feel, as the guitar sways back and forth like a hammock in the evening air, with a squeaking school of bird-like electronics setting up a call and response effect. Meanwhile, “Creature” is all synths spooling woozy tonal waves behind choral samples, with building static coils of notes that vibrate like serpent DNA at the heart of the track. The track sallies on into light cymbal flurries as tones and overtones scuttle about in surreptitious insect activity. Whence the scurrying about draws to a close electronics that sound like a band of yelping baboons begin to talk amidst one another.

Listening to Creature Comforts truly comes close to what I imagine a walk in the rainforest might be like. These lads from Brooklyn, by way of Rhode Island, have filled most every crevice with a rambunctious array of novel ideas that never stay for long, but occasionally show their beaming faces later on, and lend this environment an almost jovial restlessness. After a while, however, a certain pattern emerges from all the foliage. Each piece opens calmly with digital hiccups and the like, until gentle, melting loops of plucked guitar enter and electronic and organic threads twist together, tug apart, unravel, knot and gnarl, like multiple radio signals bleeding together on a long drive through feral hills. Often, the effect is like a bird buzzing a hippopotamus, the electronics here, there and everywhere, the guitar static and sulky. The album would have benefited from a more varied pace, which would have kept the faces of those twittering bird-like electronics seeming cute rather than overeager.

Only “Night Flight,” the album’s closer, grants one this desired change in pace, and even then only somewhat. A bleached buzz of low-grade noise harkens one forward into an upbeat romp through blasted guitar pastorals, shadowed by patches of iridescence and luminous noise blossoms. Even with the noted quibbles, Black Dice have shifted their creativity to new lands, and in that, they are admirable.