Marah-- Angels of Destruction!

I know it's awfully early in the year, but I've stumbled across the first record of 2008 that just might warrant end-of-the-year list consideration. (Well, second if you count Drive-By Truckers, but that one's technically not out yet.)

The band is called Marah, and apparently they've been around for a while, though this is the first I've heard of them. Their newly-released sixth album is enthusiastically titled Angels of Destruction!, and... well, I really don't know where to begin with it. You've really just got to hear it to believe it. Simply put, it's the most imaginative and adventurous rock album I've heard in a couple of years. It has me reaching for the same superlatives I used to describe Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs.

The lead singer sounds like a young Elvis Costello, the band falls somewhere between the Rolling Stones and the E-Street Band, and they throw together rock, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, Vaudeville, Led Zep-style blues, horns, loud guitars, lots of piano, a tendency toward theatricality, and a ten-minute closing number that takes choruses and verses from the rest of the album and splices them together as a "Day in the Life"-style suite... with a bagpipe solo in the middle.

It's nothing if not audacious.

You just have to hear it. I'm supremely weirded out by the whole thing... and I mean that in the best possible way.