How do phrases enter the lexicon? "Quiet is the new loud" seems to have sprung -- full grown as Athena -- from the tortured head of the music-crit literati, ending up everywhere from album titles to magazine articles in the past couple of months. The Spanish sextet of multi-instrumentalists named Migala falls in with the purveyors of this sonic noir (Low et al), but with a uniquely European twist and a pointed grasp of the beauty resident in even the blackest day. The components of the album -- strings, acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, percussion, accordion, the lilting Spanish accent of the English vocals and the "noise" of the "efectos especiales" -- seem at once randomly placed and lovingly crafted. Listening to Arde ("It burns," which could refer to many things, including one's conscience, heart, dreams or the flaming car wreck of the cover) conjures an image of twisting the dial of a short-wave radio in the Spanish countryside and picking up both the melodic, mournful music of the rural hills and the incessant chatter of the urban street.

The album (available now through Darla, and slated to receive full-fledged American release in September via Sub Pop) begins with two instrumentals, which mark a path more upbeat than the route that the rest of the album will follow. "Primera Parada" waltzes to the rhythm of an almost Hawaiian guitar, while "El Caballo del Malo" surges slowly upward with a cinematic, Leone-style sweep before a quiet coda ushers the "evil horse" of the title back into the barn. The song feels like the ocean, flowing up the beach on a high tide before receding into the fog. Elements are constantly added in these first few songs, and "El Caballo..." sees the introduction of those "efectos especiales", unobtrusive but effective electronic squelches and samples of Spanish television and street life, adding another layer to the songs. The third track, "Fortune's Show of Our Last", brings the basso profundo of vocalist Abel Hernandez into the mix. There's none of the Latin-tinged sauciness of a Ricky Martin in Hernandez's honey-toned, lulling yet firm delivery. (With a couple of exceptions, the instrumental tracks on the album tend to be titled in Spanish, while the songs with lyrics are titled and sung in English.) His voice complements the poetic concreteness of the songs' lyrics. The grammar is not perfect, but the effect proves more poetic than clunky" "Today is a day of disaster," begins "Last Fool Around", "I'm on the same bar/Old known people pass by/It's only my cousin that I call/As he goes to buy cigarettes and bread." This astonishingly pretty song for piano, guitar and voice adds a quick lyric sampled from Robert Johnson's "Stop Breakin' Down Blues"; though there's nothing specific to connect the two, the moment is electrifying, a luminous example of musical kinship across time and culture.

One of the album's highlights, "The Guilt," ends with the haunting lines, "And when I/when I finally sleep/it's always the same dream/sand falling fast in a glass bell./The sand, very clean,/the glass so weak." Disaster (the theme and the word itself) runs through the album, reappearing in song after song as an unavoidable fate -- the glass is always about to break. A brilliant moment occurs in "The Guilt" during the lines "I guess it would/it would be possible to crash/with one of the strangers that/I cross by the street/and have a premonition/of happiness." The "premonition of happiness" is undercut by the actual auto crash heard on the word itself, one of a number of instances when "Our Times of Disaster", as one song title has it, become audible. The literal juxtaposition of word and sound is funny, but it's also jarring, and indicative of a larger theme of the album: Life has no guarantees, but the road is lined with beautiful moments. With Arde, Migala have delivered one of them.