Sometimes an artist just nails an album title; this accomplishment cannot be underrated. When so many bands tack on throwaway lines, inside jokes, the label's pick for the first single, or random acquisitions that require extended narratives that tax even Serena Altschul's near-beatific tolerance for rock and roll bullshit, one simply has to give credit when someone does it right. Naming an instrumental album with artistic conviction requires no small degree of insight and introspection; an artist must stand far enough from the work to see it clearly. Ui's The Iron Apple EP simply could not stand under any other banner.

The Iron Apple, like Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" and Burroughs' "The Soft Machine," struggles with lines between organic and inhuman. This is Ui at their most experimental and tweaked. Ui's 1995 debut, Sidelong, used the irresistible force of twin Fender Bass guitars to twine grooves around a solid, if mildly uninteresting, skein of funk drumming. Last year's Lifelike went farther into New York post-rock, where the bands' natural funky leanings served as the thinnest of lifelines while the music itself rocketed start- and- stop into the oddest time signatures and bizarre sonic hybrids. The album was weird, but surgically so-- all of its exhilarating strangeness smacked of calculation-- which alienated many and enthralled others.

I sincerely hope that The Iron Apple EP is stalking out the future trajectories of Ui's strange wanderings. The five-track EP progresses from the very Lifelike-sounding opening track, "Mrs. Lady Lady" into cooler and cooler dimensions of abstraction. The title tracks is the sound of music being pumped full of strange inert gasses: one notices the signature grooves fail to synch up, and the spaces between instruments and notes becomes unbridgeable. The tendency is always from groove to mechanism, from the camaraderie of a trio of humans jamming with fluidity to musical miscommunication and alienation-- which is not to suggest musical ineptitude but rather an ear for sounds in insolation. The third track, "Ms. Lady," is undergirded by squawks of fuzz noise as the guitars proceed tenuously into the disorder and attempt to construct precarious grooves which never seem to hold together. Something else always emerges.

"Golden Pietro" makes nods to the style of futurism explored by Trans Am on Futureworld with sparse drum machines and looming synths. A Fender jazz bass plucks desperately at odd intervals; frightening whines of buzzsaw sounds starting cutting up the background. The buzzsaws become talk box guitar for the last few seconds of the track. The effect is unnerving.

"Run Pietro" is the least coherent track on the disc and somehow the best and most emblematic. The noisy analog effects are held in perfect sway with limpid acoustic guitar lines. That Ui groove is there but you have to stand far back to see it, to hear it unfolding over a greater sense of time. In some sense, they've lost the ass-swaggering bass guitar love that made Sidelong such a great album to party to, but The Iron Apple puts Ui's closet funk algebraics to such impressive use. This is why the title of the disc struck me as so telling: there still resides a deep, soft sensuality in Ui's music, but the fruit is armored now and the apple has sharp corners.

-Brent S. Sirota