Portland's 31Knots latest release The Days and Nights of Everything Everywhere speaks with heavy, brooding, and well, knotty intensity. Without the slightest hint of hesitation, first track "Beauty" passionately embarks on a fierce, brash trek of prickly textures and thorny progressions. Known for their quirky, unkempt brand of acerbic rock that twists and turns and rips itself apart, their work has been frequently compared to the likes of Modest Mouse and Sonic Youth because it is undeniably rock, but its cathartic experimentalism and aggressive disorderliness is too turbulent for such a trite and restrictive category.

Guitarist/Vocalist Joe Haege's voice is a yearning, anxious vehicle that fades in and out the massive musical tornado that catastrophically coils all around him. The eerie, falsetto chants within haunting "Sanctify" float amid a doom-ridden decaying piano that violently constructs a death-march while Haege speaks of heathens falling from grace. The turbulent, druggy spiraling of the album's progression paint a distinctive angst-ridden condition, but it isn't the least throwaway. The riotous and unruly character is that of a careful build, and although sounding so brutally cruel, sounds maturely crafted. The tribal-inspired groove of "Savage Boutique" pulsates with bloody passion, and the brass instrumentation comes as a complete surprise. "Hit List Shakes" (The Inconvenience of You) almost sounds like a conventional, unrequited love song, but it bleeds with such acidic musical mixtures and hammers progressions on the verge of spontaneous destruction, it is anything but conventional.

Much of the album demonstrates 31Knots' notch for unlikely combinations, producing these whirlwind, sound-circus experiences, completely enthralling and overwhelming. Prickling electronics, ghostly echoes, and unpredictable, rock-propelled build-ups and break-downs, The Days and Nights of Everything Everywhere is a completely unique experience that you simply won't hear from everyone, everywhere.