Black Foliage: Animation Music

Time will tell, but Black Foliage has all the marks of a major pop masterpiece -- brilliant tunes, innovative arrangements, clever lyrics, a thoroughly adventurous spirit, and a musical depth that always reveals something new on repeated listenings.

So maybe Black Foliage can be a bit self-indulgent and uneven at times (the short connecting tracks that recur throughout the album, for example), but such missteps go along with a brimming imagination that boldly explores the outer limits of rock's subconscious.

Amiable multi-instrumental pop shuffles in the hazy mode of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, gauzed with intricate four-part harmonies and a host of sound effects, bump up against loping, kitchen-sink ambientronic instro-ludes in albums that seem created somewhere outside of standard time by art students with a serious pop jones.

At its most generous, this may be the music of the young Brian Wilson's dysfunctional dreams. But at its most pretentious it's his bad trip.

The Georgia collective's second album is pop at its most playful and the avant-garde at its cuddliest -- a four-act, twenty-seven-song fantasy trip in which structure and chaos keep leapfrogging each other.