Artist: the Verlaines
Album: Untimely Meditations
If you’ve heard of New Zealand’s the Verlaines, it’s probably for their 1980s work. I’m not sure how useful that’ll be for a discussion of their current work (I’m reviewing their excellent 2012 Untimely Meditations but am also a 
fan of 2008’s Pot Boiler and 2010’s Corporate Moronic). The people who reviewed those early albums for AllMusic talk of them as “complex” and “fastidious” albums aided by “perfectly realized brass, woodwind, and string sections”, which reads like the Verlaines I know. But to me,
