MOSQUITOES are back and deadlier than ever. Mosquitoes challenge the abyss to a staring contest. Utilizing deep-sixed static dub imperatives over post-punk’s skeletal remains, the enigmatic trio feint and parry, duck and weave, zig and zag like they were born to slip out of your grasp and into your bloodstream.

Within Mosquitoes’ all-encompassing buzz, we find a distant link to Mars’ furious caterwaul, a direct connection to the frizzle-fried no wave of Sightings, and a tense granularity that recalls Radian’s studies of disintegration.

As the title implies, Mosquitoes create entrancing music using methods of subtraction. Paradox runs rampant over these nine tracks as Mosquitoes gesture towards the intimate, while retaining their forbiddingly alien textures.

“Minus Object Four” overwhelms with resonant vocal hum, while “Minus Object Eight” is as desolate and haunted as any Burial track. Few bands can be convincingly accused of pushing the decrepit body of rock music into the future. Mosquitoes do so by hiding the corpse in a deep chamber where shadows lurk and mysteries abound. Elusive, unnerving, sense-scrambling—this is Mosquitoes’ modus operandi.

They are a short-circuit made manifest, a cipher without decryption, a riddle without words. Mosquitoes transform the incidental movements of playing electric music (amp hum, string contact, cymbal brushes, ambient clatter) to conjure beguiling rhythmic structures.

The initial impression is haphazard, but soon the mastery, and the majesty, become glaringly obvious. Mosquitoes have so thoroughly harnessed control of their close-mic’d soundworld that to observe the final result in its natural state is a thing of wonder. On Minus Objects, Mosquitoes have achieved a grand new pinnacle.