Ravenna Woods, The Jackals (out now, self-
released, ravennawoods.net)

There’s a very intentional haunted vibe to the second album from Seattle rumblecore trio Ravenna Woods. It starts with the album’s name and its accompanying artwork—featuring a man attempting to escape out the window of a spooky house—and extends to the lyrics. “Just live alone and lock your doors,” frontman Chris Cunningham implores on the second track, “Live Alone,” over the band’s trademark pattering drums and cascading acoustic guitar. “There’s somethin’ terrible happenin’.” The music, though, doesn’t really carry the haunted vibe, which is a relief. Such all-consuming spookiness would be a rickety old bridge too far. Instead the album is lively and dense, filled with layers of insistent, tickling instrumentation and swelling orchestration. On its debut, 2010’s Demon and Lakes, Ravenna Woods established a sound rooted in drum and guitar interplay, but it felt limited to that dynamic. Here the band shows growth, adding other instruments—in particular the restrained piano work of new member Sam Miller—and proving itself adept at shifting direction and dynamic with purpose. That is the case on “Border Animals,” the band’s most fully realized song yet. It opens with that base drum-and-guitar formula before shifting and swelling to a fever pitch, Cunningham spitting out vocal darts that land like punches. The vocals, in fact, are the most haunted aspect of the album, channeling three spirits of popular song: On “Border Animals” it’s the bratty Elvis Costello; elsewhere, the regal Matt Berninger or the ethereal Thom Yorke—who’s falsetto croon Cunningham replicates on the album’s title track, a song that makes up for its clear stylistic cop with an aching emotional performance. Still, the resemblance is eerie. (Sat., Nov. 16, Neumos) MARK BAUMGARTEN