I don't wanna damn this record by weighing it down with highbrowisms, but I will say this: Rarely is music that's deemed "challenging" or "important" as straight-up good as Return to Cookie Mountain. Call it deep, call it cerebral, call it a grower, but you better call it playful and ear-friendly, too. The second LP of otherworldly introspect-rock from the Brooklyn five piece might be inscrutable, but it's certainly not inaccessible.

Still, TV On the Radio demands/inspires eloquent dissection, so bear with me. There's a unique vision at work here, one that's simultaneously sprawling and diffuse and insistent and precise. This music is both a haze of shifting influences -- prog rock, vocal jazz, Afrobeat, electro -- and the silvery beam that shines through the fog. From start to finish, Return To Cookie Mountain constructs a bracing and absorbing sonic reality, one parallel to ours but tilted boldly off by a degree. Take "Wolf Like Me," the album's first single. Resplendent dual vocals from Tunde Adibimpe and Kyp Malone pull the tune out of a weird landscape of fuzzy guitar noise, all rendered with an aggressive rock 'n' roll passion that adds a glimmer of familiarity. At the center of the album, that song's book ended by the dark, strung-out poetics of "Playhouses" and the whistle-and-handclap vocal chant "Method," making for a total stylistic headfuck that makes perfect sense in the world the band creates. Like the latter song mantras, "There is hardly a method, you know."

Actually, there is -- one that keeps most modern rock from reaching the great heights of Return To Cookie Mountain, one that TV On The Radio defy with each release.