A beautifully defiant title, the one this Baltimore quartet chose for their latest album = Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive! Just like that, with an exclamation mark, as if demanding escape from this hell on Earth. A heaven that is less and less ours by right. It therefore makes complete sense that on their sixth studio album — if we exclude the successful encounter with the veteran Arnold Dreyblatt captured on Extended Field for the FRKWYS series, again on RVNG Intl. — we find their most brazenly beautiful music. A continuous blossoming of the band's minimalist seeds which, to the usual kit of drums, guitar, bass, electronics and saxophone, now adds even more winds and, for the first time, voices. Passenger lines aligned with the trajectory already demonstrated and inexhaustible of the band, enchanted in the words and melody of an 11th-century hymn, which are cut into rhythmic accents close to Steve Reich's Tehilim. A minimalism that traverses a historical and cartographic vastness: it takes complicated rhythmic equations to weave them into a hypnotic tapestry, as indebted to Can as to the common inspiration in the polyrhythms and lines of West Africa, applies La Monte Young's 'just intonation' in angular guitar and saxophone melodies that repeat over a pulsing groovy bass and electronic textures. It is not quite, or only, rock, nor properly funk, but it lodges with space among those and other forms of music that make recurrence a means to ecstasy. BS.