Numbers draw a line from the honest clarity of traditional American music like the Carter Family through the troubled pounding of today, creating a phenomenal, appropriately dark vision of tomorrow's pop music. But there isn't an easy comparison for the dire, wounded poise of this record, a secret pact between beauty and fear. The songs are pensive and worry-stained, all minimal, bluntly entrancing riffs, insistent drumming, and tense, reverberant synthesizers. The futuristic propulsion of Kraftwerk filtered through the raw-knuckled roughness ofSuicide perhaps? Not since The Sliver Aples has a band so successfully wedded a cacophony of electronic keyboards with such a clear-voiced pop sensibility.