Wye Oak is at its most confident on 'The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs'

Anyone who has recorded music knows the process is humiliating.

After a few takes, you listen back to what you did and immediately start picking it apart. There's that one vocal phrase you hate. There's that one note where your guitar is out of tune. There's the one snare hit that's louder than anything else.

Most listeners won't hear any of it. If you're the musician, you'll hear all of it and more for the rest of your life.

On its new album, alternative rock duo Wye Oak did away with this type of thinking. Instead, on the excellent "The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs," the band went with its gut.

Recorded over a few short sessions in North Carolina and Texas, Wye Oak's sixth album is an impressive arrival point. Without time to fixate on flubs, band members Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack have written the album new listeners and longtime fans need to hear. It's an honest collection that pushes the band into its own place.

Wye Oak started as a rock band that reveled in loud-quiet-loud dynamics. After perfecting that on "The Knot," the group shifted its sound, replacing guitars and aggression with synthesizers and experimentation.

Now, Wye Oak has everything in its right place. Startling as it is to hear the band jump head first into this pop-rock mélange, this is the most consistent material Wasner and Stack have written to date.

"Lifer," a track that nods back to those louder days, blooms into a dramatic soundscape with guitar solos and cymbal sweeps, showing how much the band has grown since its debut in 2007. While the majority of the album lends itself more to keyboards and break beats, the songs are never boring, the shifts never unnatural. It's an album that continues to compel to the end.

"The Louder I Call" is the sound of Wye Oak at its most powerful, confident and beautiful. Wasner and Stack did it. No amount of nitpicking can take that away from them.