Think Amy Grant doing the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange.

The palette has been extended now to include nods to Sabbath-sludge (“No Need For a Leader”), Kinks whimsy (“The Opposite of Afternoon”) and even Boards of Canada-esque hauntology (“Dawn”) but somewhere along the line, the exhilaration of the debut has been lost.

This is one bug-eyed full-length, with an overabundance of both anxiety and energy captured by engineer Monty Buckles of the Lamps, and across nine songs it never takes a rest—across the first eight songs, it never even slows down.

There was a time around the end of the 20th Century when Greg Gomberg was one of the shining stars in our local music scene—or rather, he was part of a smoldering, sinister red dwarf, a strange and meandering band called the Centimeters that pulled half a dozen wonderful musicians, along with quite a few artists, scenesters, and drugged-out freaks into its orbit.

While the four-song Foreign Spells EP features a darker tone and more minor keys, boy-girl harmonies and sparkling pop melodies remain the band’s defining qualities.

My favorite track, “Heaven Up,” with Johanna Phraze and JNatural, certainly reclaims party rap boogie from its early 80s origins, and the blend here of live instruments and seamless samples/synths is not a goddam thing to fucking sneeze at.

Perhaps it could be argued that the lack of freneticism here is a sign of maturity, an intentional “contrast” to the youthful bombast of old–but perhaps it could also be argued that we’re all going to grow old and die soon enough, so why rush to squeeze even a week’s worth of youth and energy out of life?

If the Vaselines had decided they did NOT want to flaunt their sense of humor, they might have arrived here.

Live, Merx are a menacing enigma—a tall, blonde, howling, sometime bespectacled lead singer who is one part Alan Vega, one part Ian Curtis, and the rest horror movie madman looks blankly forward, shaking and screaming, while the rest of the band plays with no acknowledgement of anyone else in the room.

It’s impossible not to compare this to Jason Heath’s recent album, solely because this one is so much better–unlike Heath, Lawrence’s slow and steady approach means he never wears out his welcome, and even the accordion he uses sounds like a genius addition instead of like kitchen sink excessiveness.