Wye Oak's new record, Shriek, has a lot of angles and edges. There is graceful lurching, awkward effortlessness. These songs all ride hard on a rhythm and bounce and sway in ways that are tough to uncover on first listen, but that become intensely alluring over time--and I think at least some of that has to do with the way Jenn Wasner inhabits the syllables of her lyrics so intensely (in this she reminds me a little of Malkmus or even Dave Portner, who both tend to stretch and bend words to suit their purposes). She sings with the secret delight of a true word-lover, digging into each phoneme: listen to the line in "Shriek" where she sings, "other words speak/unspeakable/so full/is your affection," and try not to be awed by the wonderful and satisfying sounds of those words strung together. Shriek is the kind of album that gets its hooks in you without your realizing it--where you might go a couple days without listening to it and then you wake up one morning with a Wye Oak melody in your head that feels essential, somehow, to your existence. These songs are lovely clockwork, with their quality of seeming both set in place and set in motion, beautiful to behold on their own and kind of breathtakingly great when put together.[BUY Shriek]