An especially dramatic passage unfolds alongside Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ, which the father plays as Jack looks over his shoulder, waiting to turn the page.
Some passages unfold in the intimate first person, some in the inclusive, indicting second, and some in the panoptic third, but the over-all narrator remains elusive.
Mr. Dillon's sound world is variegated and changeable: sudden crescendos evaporate in pianissimo chords; quiet pizzicato passages unfold into sequences of descending slides that evoke whining, at times, and exoticism elsewhere.
The Secret Machines have the confidence to let instrumental passages unfold with solemn deliberation; the album's opening song, "First Wave Intact," takes nearly two minutes to stake out Josh Garza's unswerving drumbeat, Brandon Curtis's distorted bass line and Ben Curtis's fanfare of a guitar riff before the Curtis brothers begin to sing a battlefield chronicle.
The set achieved a high order of stealth: Some extraordinary passages unfolded without any of the musicians making them feel formal or clinical, almost as if natural forces were moving the musicians' hands.
But no one seems to focus on the other college right of passage that's unfolding now, the move out of the dorm and back home for the summer.
The ten-bar orchestral passage, the microlude, now unfolds.
Narrative passages of the text unfold in hauntingly lyrical choral spans quivering with astringent dissonance.
Rhythmically intricate, the work featured evocative melodies played with soulful elegance by Ms. Shankar, including a striking passage with a tune unfolding languorously over a string drone.
In these brief passages the work unfolds simultaneously on levels of picturesqueness and abstraction, drawing on music's richness of reference and on its immediate substance: on what it resembles and on what it is.
