The Taxpayers get more press than most New Orleans rock bands, and that’s because they have more history, starting out as a Portland post-­emo group of indie rockers who literally fell in love with The City That Care Forgot—romantic relationships were apparently involved—and gradually became bicoastal in nature. The music on their latest release is similarly bifurcated, but they aren’t torn between two cultures: Rather, the songs on this album veer, sometimes awkwardly, between an earnest, sweeping piano­-based pop that lands stylistically somewhere between early Springsteen and Arcade Fire and a noise-­punk scree that calls to mind a mix of Built to Spill and the Desaparecidos.

Both approaches are absolutely appropriate and even thrilling at times, given the album’s loose concept: not just a portrait of the post­Katrina struggle of the band’s beloved adopted town, but a harsh examination of America’s major cities in general and their seemingly inexorable slide into third-­world chaos. It’s just that the damaged beauty of portraits like “Call Me Linda” sit oddly next to the industrial angst of a short burst of fury like “Roll Call” or “Brain Drain.” Then again, that may be baked into the design, if a track like “Goodbye, Balance” is any indication; intense sadness punctuated by occasional, seemingly random uprisings seems to be the blueprint of the New Normal anyway. And occasionally a mid­-tempo pop­-rock grinder like “Easy Money” or a tender folk ballad like “Fuck America” captures how the anger proceeds directly from the sadness and the beauty from the pain: “Only a world so desperate for meaning could swallow the lies.”