Geoff Barrow’s most successful musical project since Portishead has been carrying the neo-Krautrock torch for a good while now. It’s gotten to the point where it’d be both reductive and a decent ballpark to compare them to a theoretical Pink Floyd that decamped to Cologne post-Meddle, not to mention that the inevitable Can comparisons are set up to tee-ball levels at this point. (They even title one of their most Tago Magoid grooves “Ah Yeh,” though it’s a lot more compact and leisurely paced than its quasi-namesake.) But like their previous works, their fourth album resonates because they have a collective knack for not merely reproducing the mechanics of off-the-cuff groove-based interplay, but sustaining this uncanny sense of sorrow and tension in their style that other contemporary bands tend to miss in pursuit of the motorik. >>>> is an album-qua-album that intends to use its individual tracks — which are typically contemplative, austere, and slow-burning no matter the tempo or volume — to build a dynamic ebb-and-flow, one where each song’s more-vibe-than-statement structure is one step in a more vividly unpredictable journey. The meaning can be elusive: opener “Strawberry Line” and its flatly-delivered droning vocals hints at an underdefined yet melancholy menace that the words leave somewhere in the margins, and the rest of the album usually follows suit in starkly monosyllabic fashion. But there’s this thematic sense of a constant power struggle, one that comes across like a case study in pitiable yet sympathetic futility in “Bloody Miles” (“We’re the only one/But still go on/We live don’t run/All has gone”) and a haunted effort to find reconciliation in “Secrets” (“And I know/We are different/And I know/We need answers”). And as terse and vague as those lyrics can be, the music’s own language is elaborately evocative enough to fill in the rest. In some ways, it feels like the whole album is building up to its midpoint. The scene-setting epic build that takes “Strawberry Line” into the kosmische stratosphere and follows it up with a Silver Apples rhythm section rumination (“The Seal”), a brief diversion into warped fuzz-psych sludge (“Windmill Hill”), and a downtempo bass-heavy trudge through busted-Mellotron hauntology (“Denim”) culminates in “Hungry Are We” — something of a centerpiece of the album, and not just in the runtime. It’s a quietly bleak harmony-driven ambush of beautiful hardship, like the Crosby, Stills & Nash of “Wooden Ships” realizing they’re down to their last days and trying to make peace with it even as they hold out for some last glimpse of hope.