Rotary Downs

Taking a page from pre-millennial, post-modern poppers like Beck and Soul Coughing, Rotary Downs reels freely between quizzical and intellectual. Chained to the Chariot, the New Orleans quartet's third full-length, pivots pedal steel, trumpet and organ on top of grandly unpredictable arrangements; the fun is watching which way these songs fall. Singer James Marler sounds like has been taking double shots of thesaurus, unraveling densely packed rhymes in his abstracted lyrics. Too lo-fi to be baroque, too catchy to be experimental, songs like "G-7 Hit!" and "A Feast in Squalor" swerve into woozy grooves but don't stay for long.