At some point, most rock ’n’ roll fans—particularly guys—dabble in art rock. Like drugs, lots of tiny notes and odd time signatures are a phase you go through. If all art rock was as textured and subtly witty as Twangorama, few would deny they ever owned Pink Floyd, Rush, Yes and Genesis albums. The band features the guitar talents of Woodenhead’s Jimmy Robinson, Cranston Clements and Phil deGruy, but as much three guitars promises a lot of wanky soloing, what you get instead are a series of songs that are smartly arranged but rarely intricate-for-intricacy’s sake.

This album periodically brings to mind Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp, but Twangorama doesn’t have the same sense of self-importance that their projects carry or carried. The interplay between the guitars is Twangorama’s strength, but the guitars are only employed to obviously showy effect on the cover of the Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind.” The band makes the simplest song on the album the most complex, assigning a full band’s worth of parts—including vocalist—to three guitars, who fill all available space with cascades of notes, some harmonizing, some playing counterpoint, some playing the melody. After that, even the most complex jazz rock sounds (relatively) simple and pleasantly unassuming.