Listening's a funny thing. When I first played the second release by the trio Weird Weapons, it struck me as so chaotic, so unhinged, so full of arbitrary gesture, that I set it aside — not giving up on it but not anxious to revisit it either. I'd enjoyed their first release (self-titled, Emanem, 2005), but this one left me wanting.

I'm not sure what happened between listen one and listen two but upon putting it on again it was as if the contents of the package had settled. On listen two I found 2 to be a nicely centered and even somewhat gentle record. Sure it was still full of door knocking and insect buzzing, but it ably fell together. It is long-form improv and so still reflects the trajectories of flights of fancy of its players, but the spontaneity doesn't devolve into haphazardness. This is due in large part to the almost frighteningly machine-like precision of drummer Tony Buck. If guitarist Olaf Rupp and bassist Joe Williamson are each bearing 1/3 of the weight, Buck still shoulders at least half of it. He's capable of extraordinary polyrhythms, providing two or three layers of patterns onto which the others may fall.

And fall they do, like leaves and hail across the levels of tempo. Rupp and Williams both play acoustic, so their sound is woody and organic. Rupp goes for a lot of scraped and muted textures and often falls between the cracks of the percussion while Williamson is a deep soloist, occupying the front line an unusual amount for a bassist.

The record is not without frenzied passages, but each of the players is so firmly in place that even their cacophonies feel assured.