ollowing up their worthwhile debut Opera from earlier this year, Tape — the electro-acoustic trio of Andreas and Johan Berthling and Tomas Hallonsten — have interestingly refined and expanded upon that album’s subtle pleasures. Milieu is hardly a drastic departure for the trio, and their music is still completely gorgeous, tranquil, and delicately melodic. But the group’s songs also seem slightly more solid, less like leaves meandering by on a slow-moving stream. On Opera, the trio’s fragile melodies hovered in a pool of sparse field recordings and faded easily into the tangle of instruments, each moment inevitably lost to memory in the experience of the next moment.

On Milieu, each track feels somehow more concrete, though electronics and traces of field recordings still pepper the music. “Sponge Chorus” lolls gently along on quickly strummed acoustic guitar and a lovely trumpet that pops up far too seldom. “Golden Twig” finds the group sliding easily into a lazily bouncy groove, with twangy guitars accenting a steady up-and-down lilt. Of course, even on the most straightforward songs here, this accessible beauty is only the surface; there’s a wealth of detail squeezed into every crack and crevice of the music without ever making things seemed cluttered or chaotic. On “Golden Twig,” field recordings of some kind of rattling, shaking, moving noises serve as a rough percussion, and tweeting electronics drift by almost unnoticed in the background.

Other songs take a more subtle route, such as “Long Bell,” which is for the most part minimalistically quiet, comprised mainly of extended trumpet smears, tentative vibe notes, and the circular scraping sound of something being run along the edge of a drum. But the highlight of the disc is undoubtedly the closer, “Switchboard Fog,” which pairs a plucked two-note banjo melody with the trio’s usual sonic collage — a piano tinkles brightly, a violin lets loose a stream of scrabbling notes, and various electronic melodies merge into this framework. With the addition of a banjo, the song conjures up Appalachian folk, but is easily filtered into the warm, pastoral glow of Tape’s aesthetic and ends up sounding natural.

Milieu is ultimately not such a different album from Opera, but it definitely seems like the group has taken a step towards song-based music; each track on the album, though contributing to the overall mood, feels like more of a discrete unit than the cohesive dream-like journey that was Opera. Milieu is both more concrete and crisper, sharper: it’s like the dream of the first album viewed clearly after waking, the vague dream imagery seeming somehow less significant and deep in the harsh light of day. The music remains pleasant over the entire course of the album, but without Opera’s ethereality, Milieu just doesn’t go much beyond pleasant. Or perhaps it’s merely overexposure — too much bucolic, melodic pastiche from these guys in one year — but this undeniably pretty record is just not as satisfying as the first one.