David Pajo clearly has a few good albums left in him before it's time to ship him off to the Lou Barlow Home for People Who Can't Think Up Very Good Band Names. Live from a Shark Cage is, predictably, very mellow and very minimal. In typical Pajo/M-named-band style, melodies are very gently and gradually coaxed from guitars; it's more like the guitars are being milked than played, each note gently plucked and then squeezed down the neck of the guitar to freedom. Textures are built from the repetition of simple melodies, layered and woven into delicate, lacy patterns of sound. "I Am Not Lonely with Cricket" drags its trebly little tune through fifteen straight minutes of metamorphosis, allowing it to grow more otherworldy and harmonic as it expands and contracts through the aural dimensions. Elsewhere, Pajo adds a banjo. The banjo's plummy pluckings add solidity to "Pink Holler," and team with a conventionally strummed (and knocked) acoustic six-string on the solemnly spontaneous "Knocking the Casket". Those seeking the bleary gravity of Aerial M will find it without difficulty on "Arundel," which provides prologue and epilogue to the album, or the muffled grandeur of "Drunken Spree" (which, ironically, would actually be tolerable listening on the morning after its titular excesses). With music so sparse, it's probably difficult to see many stylistic changes in the transition from Aerial M to Papa M, and indeed there aren't many to see -- a few more keyboard-generated rhythms, perhaps, and the pleasing departure of the well-sequenced "Knocking the Casket". But Papa M's songs, like Aerial M's, are worlds unto themselves. Pajo may not travel far between albums, but each song can yield miles of subtly varied musical terrain.