The Los Angeles band blends playfulness with high drama, infectious beats with experimental flourishes, and the result is a highly satisfying record - not quite a concept album, but a nicely organized set of songs with a few weak points. The simplicity of some of the lyrics is balanced out by sophisticated production, blending, at times, a lolloping disco bass with bright trumpet lines, as in “The Idiot,” or pairing a military drum line with pedal steel and handclaps on “If Tuesday Comes,” the album’s triumphant final track. Fol Chen’s sound owes something to contemporaries like of Montreal and Hot Chip (who they credit as inspiration in their blurb on the Asthmatic Kitty label website), but also to experimental 60s and 70s rock.

The gorgeous “You and Your Sister in Jericho” grounds an extended groove with a deceptively simple melodic guitar figure, eventually building to a noisy crescendo with what sounds like one of those theatrical thunder sheets being rattled. Contrast this with the pure electro dance pop of “Cable TV” or “No Wedding Cake,” and you’ve got a band that can switch gears at will, somehow managing to do everything well.

Maybe this has something to do with who Fol Chen know – not only do they have a couple of celebrity guest vocalists contributing to the record, but the video for “Cable TV” features a quintet of Lakers Girls gyrating in a dry swimming pool. There’s an air of mystery about the band, and their press releases are archly non-revealing about the identities of the various members. Their anonymity is nothing on the level of a band like the Residents – it hews closer to Kool Keith or Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who utilize a fictional persona to give their audience something bigger than life, or to play out an idea on multiple levels.

It seems as if the band are referencing a set of personal stories and symbols by representing Fol Chen as a group of not-quite-super heroes with a mission to fight evil in the form of “John Shade,” whose name provides the album’s somewhat clunky title. It may be worth noting that John Shade is the fictional main character in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, a notoriously difficult work that deals with, oddly enough, both the reality of the character and the poem he’s writing, also called “Pale Fire.” For a band trafficking in whimsical identity games, this connection is smart and natural.

All of the game playing would hardly matter if the music were not fundamentally worth hearing, and the band’s hide-and-go-seek doesn’t get out of control - judging from the live clips available on Youtube, it’s evident that Fol Chen act pretty much like a normal indie rock band, singing and playing enthusiastically but without many theatrical pretensions. It’s just as well. An overly crafted stage presence would take away from the immediacy of the emotional high delivered by Fol Chen’s exceedingly well-written songs. This is definitely one to watch out for.

Recommended Tracks: “You and Your Sister in Jericho," "If Tuesday Comes"