Portland duo Nice Nice have been a making music for more than a decade. Their first full-length, Chrome, was released in 2003, as well as a handful of other EPs, but it’s Extra Wow that most accurately displays their very real and impressive capabilities as a band. While previous records focused more on a sparse, sometimes disparate sound that very much came from their Pacific Northwest roots, Extra Wow is a more nuanced album, more concerned with layering and ambiance and circularity than dissonance and lo-fi production.

Which is not to say that Extra Wow is a slickly produced effort; on the contrary, it’s full of fuzzy guitars, crackling percussion, and distant, blurry vocals–something fans of Animal Collective and Atlas Sound will all appreciate. But there’s an attention–an attention often neglected in experimental music–paid to melody, even if melody itself is not at the forefront. Melody becomes an element no more or less important than the drums or washed-out chords, but it’s always there, even if, with the exception of a couple of songs–the excellent Afrobeat-inspired (but not exploitative) “See Waves,” for example–it hardly stands out. But this is just because the cohesion of the entire album, the way the tracks move from one to another, and within themselves, is more important to Nice Nice than individual parts. Because Extra Wow is, despite the fact that “See Waves” is the kind of song you want to listen to again and again, an album that makes you lose your sense of timing and space. You’re not sure if you’re at track 3 or track 13, but it doesn’t matter, really. It’s nice to hear a band that’s considered itself experimental and progressive actually experiment and progress with its career: in the case of Nice Nice, both the group and the fans are better for it.

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