Iran’s prior two albums with indier-than-indie San Fran label tUMULt came swathed in a dark, sweltering, hirsute rag. The pop cores of the songs were obvious and immediate, they were pretty tunes with straightforward words, but the channel was garbled and semi-permeably jammed. Part of what made Iran compelling was the difficulty in determining whether they maimed their sound as a natural aesthetic function -- an organ, or something destructively active like a lesion -- or just relied on that noise and static as an artsy veil to something mundane.

Well, if it was a crutch, it’s gone now, and Iran’s current stride for just-plain-indie New York-based Narnack Records reveals itself to be composed and confident and not in the least mundane. Keyser Soze, if you will. “I Already Know You’re Wrong” is as striking as anything they’ve done, and it’s because the craft now speaks more loudly than the style. The song begins clean and content, its bass line’s playful tug pulling along the lead guitar that drips gold over the steady shuffle of the drum kit, yet when the song peaks with Aaron Aites’ cries of “I already know you’re wrong / but I’m not letting on,” a paradigm shift arrives close on the heels of a rising synthesizer algorithm. Bass and keys become slow-swallow descents while the lead guitar flies off on its own; the drums just keep shuffling as Aites finishes with mutters and melodic wavers. And didn’t these lyrics start off describing a bum show? How’d it end up a cryptic epiphany? This could almost be mistaken for a lost Wrens song, and quite a good one at that. In sum, Iran still master their arresting contextual mash; it’s just that here they contrast values and create intrigue through seamless, crystalline juxtaposition rather than ghetto-blaster blending. Make that a big rah to artist maturation and bring on the full length.

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