Available on: Thrill Jockey LP

There are plenty of bands out there whose music consists of a grab bag of cool signifiers, but West Coast three-piece Mi Ami’s sound is defiantly singular and peculiar, raging but channelled through a dub vortex.

Recorded live, Steal Your Face is Mi Ami’s second album – their first for Thrill Jockey – and it’s on fire. More developed and together than their debut Watersports, it stretches the possibilities of a tight rhythm and bass, screaming vocals and guitar and an echo box to their fullest.

Singer and guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick has one of the most unsettling voices in modern music, switching from screaming himself to near exhaustion on ‘Secrets’ to a mumbling falsetto on the lush, melodic ‘Dreamers’. McCormick’s always at the front of the action, firing off semi-melodic passages of guitar somewhere between bluegrass and free jazz, or swift harmonic picking that recalls U2’s The Edge at his most exciting.

From the first track, the Tom Tom Club referencing ‘Harmonics (Genius of Love)’, Steal Your Face is disorientating and pummelling, deep bass and hyper-rhythmic drums subtly swelling and lulling against echo-treated vocal rages. ‘Latin Lover’ comes on like a charge at empty hipsters – “I felt somoething, I got excited, is it cool?” it asks over shambolic punk-funk that ends in a crescendo of blistering guitar, dub sonics and Pac Man bleeps. ‘Native American (Born in the USA)’ meanwhile confronts naive optimism over mock noble melodies and galloping drums – “nah, forget it friend, it will never be any different.”

At under 40 minutes this bout of rich confrontation doesn’t outstay its welcome, finishing with something resembling singing on ‘Slow’ while McCormick’s guitar burns a hole through the skeletal song structure of drums and bass. Steal Your Face is a tough, brave album from a band that seems to want to confront emptiness and make you feel alive.

Marcus Scott