With their fourth studio album, Eels continue polishing their crusty strain of alternative rock and off-putting pop, with quick and usually open-ended stories of unsatisfied desires.  Pitting catchy choruses and hooky melodies against themes of death, depression, and an antagonistic world, the band busies up the base arrangements with a potpourri of background sounds, fragmentary samples, keyboard inflections, and murky filters on the vocals.  Touches like parade-style horns dove-tailing into raspy electric guitar, music-box piano against reversed synths, and the persistent lo-fi pressure in the clearly high-budget production help maintain an atmosphere of unpredictable oddities, and while the drowning of the vocals in studio effects keeps it from being as memorable as preceding albums in the group’s catalog, it still has some interesting expressions and experiments of its off-beat style.