It would be idiotic to say that 2 Foot Flame, too, have made a rock album, but if you cushion the idea in enough caveats, and remember that everything is relative, there's a tiny sense in which it's true. Smith and Morley manipulate guitars, but almost never actually play them. Track lengths seem to be determined more by the band's attention span than by any internal structure of what they're recording. Aube albums are invariably difficult to listen to, and this one isn't an exception to that rule, but on the scale of Aube recordings, this is about as accessible as they get. One might ask, reasonably enough, why I keep buying Aube recordings.
Subsequent additions are harder to justify.
This is no more formulaic than Matthew Sweet songs, but no less, either, so any meta-lesson should have been learned a while ago. Matthew Sweet songs also have the advantage of being appealing and tuneful, while Aube's albums consist of noises that, were they coming from any other source, would qualify as a household emergency. Yet this album has now survived at least one more turn in my CD player than Matthew's last album did before I shelved it. The most obvious explanation is that I'm hopelessly jaded, and only raw sensory overload can make an impression on me any more, but if that were true, I doubt I could also appreciate the new Lightning Seeds and Prefab Sprout albums. So it must be that I like the sensation of having somebody scrape a rotary saw back and forth over a titanium helmet for an hour while I'm wearing it.