Caspian

For more than 20 years, every Caspian album has been driven by a desire to stretch boundaries. On Caspian, the band’s first album in six years and debut for Wax Bodega, the way forward was to stop searching for what they hadn’t yet done and trust what had defined them from the beginning.

The six-song, 39-minute effort draws freely from the musical vocabulary they’ve spent their career writing: evocative melodic themes, dense textures, swelling crescendos and crushing heaviness that rolls in like a slow-moving storm on the horizon.

The nine-minute Remain turns a recurring melody into a sweeping study in tension and release, while No One Left to Tell layers subtle shifts around a hypnotic tremolo figure and A Great Fire sends serpentine guitars crashing into buzzsaw riffs. The graceful 3/4-time closer Waltz for the End reflects the quiet confidence of five musicians comfortable enough in their skin to resist reinvention for its own sake.