Fair to Midland's amazing new album is poised to blow everything you knew about hard rock out of the water. They continue to push the boundaries of sounds, instruments, lyrics, and attitude that are the staples, and sometimes the stagnation, of the hard rock and metal scene.

Riding the line between mainstream and avant-garde, FTM has made an album that is hard to define but appealing for the fact that it is quite simply excellent music. Where their debut album The Carbon Copy Silver Lining was a frenetic and exhilarating exercise in a more typical metal mold, it had moments of sheer beauty and heart-rending emotion more apt to a genre like Emo and hinting at their ability to fuse two such dissimilar realms.

Their mastery of force and feeling are met in an astounding collection in inter.funda.stifle. From the title to the track names and most certainly in the lyrics, you'll be hard pressed to nail down much in the way of a message of the band or even much in the way of discernable interpretation, to the point that one must figure that it is an intentional misdirection of the expected pretty-boxes to which musicians are neatly assigned, a noble tradition taking in such respected artists as Tool, The Doors, and even a not-so-far-reach to R.E.M.

In their entire style, there is an attractive elusiveness, coyness even, in the way the band plays so many directions; a carnival or vampire movie like organ interlude in "Ciperion" to what might be called New-Age metal, world beat, the Coldplay/Radiohead influenced "Timbuktu", and myriad other evidences of a wide spectrum of musical literacy that invests this one album with something everyone can find reason to enjoy.

This album is the soundtrack to that movie you don't really understand but can't stop thinking about. It's what you listen to and break down crying or drift softly into peaceful sleep.