Three years may have passed between Gary War's Horribles Parade and its follow-up, Jared's Lot, but it feels like light-years worth of progress between the two. A lot more electronic and a lot less lo-fi, this set of songs is as crisp and streamlined as Parade was sprawling and murky. That murk was a big part of the appeal of Gary War's earlier work, carrying within it strains of My Bloody Valentine, Chrome, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at various points, but Jared's Lot shows that stripping these songs clean of that funk doesn't diminish the fever-dream purity and surreality of War's work at all. Indeed, the same nervy urgency propels even the prettiest songs here, such as the dense synth fantasia "Find Our Way" and "World After," a dreamy ballad that lets War's lysergic side shine like a crazy diamond. The emphasis on electronics makes Jared's Lot even more sci-fi friendly than Gary War's earlier albums, which is saying a lot. "Superlifer," with its sparkling arpeggios, may be poppier than the average War track (if there is such a thing), but it still sounds like the Doctor Who theme song mixed with something off of Bruce Haack's BITE. War spends his time on Jared's Lot flipping between this newfound accessibility and densely packed weirdness with equal flair: The fittingly named "Thousand Yard Stare" is anthemic and vaguely mournful, not to mention beautiful in a way War couldn't have achieved previously, while "Careless" and "Muscle Dysmorphia" are respectively tight and danceable, words that would have been hard to apply to much of his earlier work. On the other hand, "Advancements in Disgust" and "Pleading for Annihilation" channel their warped, sinister melodies with an admirably high signal to noise ratio. While Jared's Lot is certainly Gary War's most immediate work to date, the bottom line is that it condenses everything good and weird about his music into eight tracks that suggest even better and weirder things to come. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi

1		Thousand Yard Stare
2		Advancements in Disgust
3		Superlifer
4		Find Our Way
5		Pleading for Annihilation
6		Care Less
7		World After
8		Muscle Dysmorphia

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