Never heard of this band and completely missed any and all hoopla around them in 2009. (Too busy listening to Mastodon at the time, surely.) As is, the timing works better now than then anyway as far as them getting a fair chance from me and my silly ears. I've been listening to Low a lot lately. And Codeine. So I'm all here for some minimalism. But listening to Low is a really great example of how this album would have been infinitely better if the two singers had any proclivity to harmonize whatsoever. Instead, I found myself wishing that they were either better singers, or maybe that even if they were worse singers that would be an improvement, in a way. Trade vocal ability for pure attitude, emotion, and lyricism. Yeah, that's fine! That would be interesting at least! But that ain't what we got. The vocals are all in this gray area of just not being very good OR interesting. In fact, my favorite song here by a country mile was "Shelter," and that's largely due to the fact that only the female vocalist sings on that one. Sounds mean, but I would listen to a remix of this album that got rid of the male vocals and I promise you I would like it better. I'd go 2 and 1/2 if I could, but I'm feeling nice because it's summer and I was still in my pajamas at like 11:45 today.