Waltzing Tilde

Coming off the committed sprawl of “Message From Bob,” this is the album’s most rigorous turn inward, and the whole record hangs on a single joke that Rose refuses to let be funny: two people insisting they’re the same, and language quietly proving them wrong every time. It begins with a three-note figure, a rising minor third and a falling semitone, stated in plain octave unison by piano and marimba, and the entire piece is that motif under stress: reversed, inverted, stacked in different meters until the players stop agreeing on where the bar starts. Listen to the third interlude, where guitar walks off in 5/4 while the piano keeps its waltz and the bar lines quietly stop coinciding; by the closing section the ensemble strains toward a 7/8 stumble before snapping back to one last unison, with the marimba holding a single wrong pitch like a held grudge. The dialogue stays near-spoken and dry, the alto landing the killers: ‘So we went to the same sign,’ and then the whole argument collapsing into ‘The pronoun.’ It asks patience, and its pleasures are more architectural than immediate, so it plays as a grower more than a first-spin favorite; but for anyone who followed the meter games of ‘Unreasonably Quiet’ this far, it’s a fascinating, rigorous thing, and it earns its late-album placement as the moment the record stops performing and starts thinking. Worthy of a listen.