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After the charming improbability of their 2005 debut, the Duke Spirit's Neptune aims to prove the group is ready for its close-up.

The Duke Spirit's bare-boned debut, 2005's Cuts Across the Land, flourished on the charming improbability of its artistic success. Surrounded by little hype, the British quintet cooked up ornery blues-rock that should've been rendered superfluous by similarly bluesy marquee acts like the Kills and White Stripes. Yet Cuts' murky sonics and dark lyrics mystified a genre that's become almost painfully familiar to listeners this decade. Neptune, on the other hand, practically screams that the band's ready for their close-up, and the band buckles under the pressure of an album where artistic (and possibly financial) success is expected.

With Queens of the Stone Age producer and Masters of Reality founder Chris Goss behind the boards, the band took the next logical step and transplanted to Southern California to record Neptune. Don't confuse the album for a Desert Session, though. For one, there's a pretty overt nautical theme running these thirteen tracks, but even more surprisingly, the band's no-frills sound shows shrugs off the peyote-driven haze inherent in nearly everything Goss touches. Instead, Goss airbrushes the cold droning guitars a tad and fills the unintentional canyons of reverb with something more professional, but otherwise it's the same old Duke Spirit.

Single "The Step and the Walk" sports some time-tested blues heartbreak as frontwoman Liela Moss opines over a straightforward riff. Although her signature husky alto remains intact, the heightened recording clarity draws increased attention to stock lines like "I'm moving to the end of your loving." This becomes problematic when the band attempts a power ballad like "Wooden Heart", leaving a wistful Saddle Creek sentiment ("I would understand your heart/ If I could feel it") out to dry amidst instrumentation that's nurtured to the point of boredom. That's not to say Goss' skills add nothing to the Spirit's swagger. The tumbling slide guitar on "This Ship Was Built to Last" exorcises many of PJ Harvey's Desert Session highlights, and the flurry of droning piano keys on "Send a Little Love Token" adds a nuanced texture to the band's raw sound.

For songwriters so ambivalent about their tuneful side, the Spirit take their biggest steps forward here on slower, weirder folk numbers. "Dog Roses" sounds like a haunting sea chantey, benefiting especially from Moss' erratic melody and a dissonant yet hummable chorus of "oooh's"-- a welcome departure from Neptune's glut of forced rock choruses. Closer "Sovereign" does its best to defrost the album's emotionally detached chill, though it's up against several tracks worth of numb rawk, and that's the double-edged sword on Neptune. The Spirit still play hard-to-get, which helps to avoid any ridiculous moments on this polished sophomore effort, but they're often too stand-offish to even challenge the listener, let alone push the envelope that their influences have so neatly prepared for them. Somehow they emerge from the desert with less of an aura of mystery than they entered with, granting us only the occasional mirage.

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