A friendly note to bands and songwriters who, like Kid Dakota's Darren Jackson, have entertained thoughts of penning a concept album: whatever you do, don't let your PR firm compare your shiny conceptual meisterwork to Dark Side of the Moon. Record reviewers are a lazy lot (well, maybe just this one), and we'll be so pissed that you've kneecapped our chance to fatten up our word count by contrasting your ringing guitars and head-scratching lyrics with the Floyd's dope-smokers' delight that we'll bitchily pan your album as a bloated, navel-gazing load of gruel.

Unless, of course, as in The West is the Future's case, it's really frickin' good. In that case, we'll swoon over your genius like pre-teens at an Usher show.

Dark Side is the easiest comparison point, but not the most accurate. The subject matter behind the shuffling waltzes, scruffy alt-country ballads and powerful noise-rock epics that make up The West really has more in common with Neil Young's confused Greendale song-cycle. Jackson's tales of ennui, contempt, hope and despair are told Canterbury Tales-style, through a rotating cast of narrators in a small South Dakotan nowheresville. The unpredictable rhythmic turns, titanic guitar monoliths and timid/towering vocals sound as if they were learned from another text, too: with a little less open-prairie grandeur and a lot more sad-bastard grumbling, this could very well be OK Computer.

The loud vs. soft dynamic is The West's backbone. Guitarists Jackson and Erik Appelwick can shift on a dime from tumultuous Unwound-style guitar mayhem to straight-up C&W strumming to fragile slowcore melancholia, a trick they pull several times here. "Pilgrim", the impressive alt-country monster that kicks off the album, gallops and flails with a paranoid urgency not unlike Coheed and Cambria's, but decked out in spurs and assless chaps; "Homesteader" wallows in sorrowful multi-tracked voices, cicadas and cloud-splitting Telecaster crescendos. The funereal "Pine Ridge" spins the unsettling tale of life on the wrong side of a small town, with Jackson delivering grim lines like "The night is dark / And there's unrest / Drums in the distance / They're beating them to death" in tense whispers and tortured wails. "Ivan" clatters along at a furious pace, while "Ten Thousand Leaves" slows to the lazy shuffle of a watery waltz. The sounds in the margins add to the album's rich ambience, most effectively in the creaking floorboards and muttered conversations that bleed into "Starlight Motel".

The West is the Future is an ambitious and thoughtfully executed exercise in lyrical storytelling, dramatic tone and melodic extremes. If there's a problem with the album, it's in its unrelentingly dark tone. It can be an incessantly dreary and dour listen sometimes, like an Edgar Allen Poe poem set to the beat of a backwoods bar-band. Despite the thick coating of gloom (and particularly disturbing album art), there's a sliver of optimism buried in these nine interesting tracks that's well worth digging for.