Albums like this are critic bait. Though surely not consciously designed as such, they possess an exact combination of approaches and ingredients, virtually guaranteed to pierce any scribe's cynical shell. Your Voice Repeating is experimental and prone to drone and sprawl, but it's also jammed with heartbreaking melodies. It's self-produced and humble, and at the same time ambitious and cinematic. It uses both old and new machinery, and sounds like the past and the future. It has something for nearly everyone, but never once feels calculated.

This Kansas City trio's no-doubt impressive home studio gear is in worthy young hands, as Your Voice Repeating continually tests its limits while never letting the admittedly fascinating production choices overshadow the aching humanity of the songs they're here to present. So while the baptised-in-reverb drums, keyboard violins and overall kitchen-sink sound of "Full & Frayed" might be ornate, it only serves to celebrate the poignant beauty of the skeletal song at its core; here, it's just an acoustic guitar and a pensive voice singing, "clouds and stars collide / pulsing air expands then subsides / stirred by a spark / we're standing awake here". After everything the song has been building toward evaporates into a few bleak, lonely piano notes, these too build up again into a heavenly crescendo.

Namelessnumberheadman aren't afraid of real, Warp-style breakbeats ("Going to Breathe Again"), but they're more comfortable with minimal dimestore beats that usually give way to clobbering low-end throbs ("Every Fiber"). The instrumental epic "Tension Envelopes" grafts one of these cheap keyboard beats onto a wiry looping guitar riff for a genuinely spooky couple of minutes, then cleanly segues into a serene acoustic/pedal steel meditation.

If any of this sounds too cerebral for you, be aware that there are also tracks like "Attic Fan" and "(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause & Effect", which undauntedly flirt with arena rock bombast. And that returns us to the disc's "something for everyone" quality. RIYLs are more useless than usual here, because Namelessnumberheadman's music spans such a diverse range of the canon. Your Voice Repeating is bait you should risk taking.