With an eye toward being actually able to play their stuff live, ECC has dumped some of the bells and whistles from their sound for this album, one benefit of which is more raw — if you consider albums like Kid A raw — tuneage. This is the first real test for the band since their one-off Twilight: Eclipse-soundtrack-written single “A Million Miles An Hour” got them noticed, so it remains to be seen if the world is really waiting with baited breath for something that sounds like Radiohead vs Bright Eyes. Josh Ostrander’s voice, when he isn’t Yorke-ing out a little, is Dylan-by-way-of-Dan Bern, which adds the possibility of jam-folkies taking to this as warmly as the cube-droid big-label-“alt-rock” crowd could. The band was as surprised as anyone at how melancholy these well-written tunes turned out sounding, but it’s not funereal by any means, it’s classy, like an Americana-tinged Coldplay, most prominently on album opener “Attica.” A

— Eric W. Saeger