BRAIDS hit me like an infection. I heard the arpeggio guitar loop of Lemonade in a mashup and set about ravenously searching for what on earth it was. When I heard the song, I then looked for the album online. After hearing it once, I ordered the record, and then had it on constant repeat on my iPod for the next two weeks. And here, months later, after knowing every melody and every sound and every turn the music takes, the album constantly proves its staying power and ever-present freshness.

What sets BRAIDS apart from the scores of other dream pop/art rock/avante-garde/whatever groups that came out in the late oughts/early 10s is the exuberence the band plays with. They are possessed by a reckless glee that pervades even the downtempo tracks in the middle of the playlist. That abandon is tempered with a post-rock sensibility for creating sonic scenes, with the guitars and synthesizers leaking into eachother’s space until you can hardly tell which is which while the rhythm section keeps the chaos grounded. Raphaelle Standell-Preston, the lead singer and chief lyricist, sings with the ferocity of a riot grrl and the abstractness of Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, spitting both venom and honey as she waxes poetic on the neighborhood whore, her beloved, or her own unsettledness, not restricting herself to the vocabulary of existing language or a syntax of sense-making. The fabricated words, like the mingling of instruments, serve to create an album that is as surreal as it is vernacular, and as conscious as it is dream-like, like the first moments of waking when your eyes are open, but your mind hasn’t quite stopped dreaming, put to indie rock stomp.