When all my other options have been exhausted-- medication, therapy, self-help literature, religion, art, personal ads, fad diets, investing in the stock market, trepanation-- and I've finally decided to kill myself, I'm going to do it right, dammit. I'm going to sell everything I own, save for a stereo and a copy of the Radar Bros.' eponymous album, and buy a tiny uninhabited island in the South Pacific. And I'm going to go there and lie naked on the beach and listen to the album on infinite repeat as I slowly disintegrate into a pile of sunburned ash.

Then again, it's kind of difficult to be bored and jaded when you're dead. And as the Radar Bros. have probably realized by now, the edge of the abyss can sometimes afford a breathtaking view, but the balancing act can get a little wearying. That's why it's a bit of a relief that The Singing Hatchet takes a step or two back from that edge; its comfortable numbness is no longer as melodramatic as wistfully sighed lines like "silver letter opener / in the shower / with the scrubber," but it still plays like a soundtrack to a tranquilizer overdose.

The Radar Bros. play the type of slowcore that's the diurnal opposite of Low-- while the latter is best listened to at night, the former is best listened to during the day. Instead of gothic, reverb-drenched murkiness, we get crisp, unadorned guitars strumming slowly alongside low-level keyboard hums and frontman Jim Putnam's fragile, exhausted vocals. The band has stuck pretty closely to this formula throughout its existence, producing music of remarkably consistent quality, although not a whole lot of melodic variety. The songs on The Singing Hatchet, like the Bros.' past releases, blur into each other until the whole thing feels like one long, slow ache without much change in tempo or tone.

But every now and then, a little production flourish emerges from the haze of the album to perfectly capture the Radar Bros.' languorous vision, like the fluttering sample on "To Be Free Again," the slide-guitar coda of "Find The Hour," or the gently crackling static in the background of "Tar The Roofs." And there are at least two songs, "Shifty Lies" and "Shoveling Sons," which are pure bliss from start to end; to hear them one more time might just be reason enough to stay alive a little while longer. So how about it? Have you found your reason to live today?

-Nick Mirov