et’s start from the beginning: four RISD boys start a band with expectedly arty inclinations and a formula that practically guarantees instant notoriety. Under the name Black Dice, these boys develop a wildly confrontational brand of hardcore that hitches unpitched feedback blasts and ruptured vocal cords to scattershot drumming and amorphous bass swells. It’s all very intense and sounds more than a little like AMM playing Void’s greatest hits over a wobbly reel-to-reel recording of Metal Machine Music amplified to cochlea-shredding extremes. Their live shows become the stuff of legend – spastic fits of unprovoked violence toward the audience and each other, frequencies designed for torturing dogs or inducing avalanches, volume capable of severe architectural damage. They release two albums and a handful of much-coveted seven inches that are all excellent in their own right but fail to capture the life-affirming terror of spending fifteen minutes in a dark room with four guys who may or may not be out to hospitalize you. They go back to doing what they do best – inducing that terror in dingy basements across the nation.

And then they pull the rug out from under you and everybody else who thought they had Black Dice figured out. On Beaches and Canyons – their third full-length album and their first for electroclash stronghold DFA – Black Dice jettisons the formal constraints of their hardcore frenzy in order to reshape its raw materials into something altogether different – a surprisingly restrained hazy stream of vibrant and evocative psychedelia. Guitars still bleat from beneath a mass of analogue treatments, basses still billow, and vocals still groan and yelp, but now they collide and swell in a colorful wide-screen wilderness instead of a claustrophobic cellar. Black Dice’s noises no longer thrash around in confused piles but pile up into dense tangles of sound propelled by fractured chanting and muscular drums. A ritualistic thread runs throughout – there’s something mystical in Beaches and Canyons , something raw and primal.

Primal, yes, but certainly not primitive – what Black Dice forfeited in violence they gained in sonic variety and nuance. New juxtapositions emerge and form mobiles of textures that uncover unlikely commonalities between the mechanical and organic. On “Seabirds” they engage in an astonishing act of analogue alchemy, summoning the chirps of the track’s namesake from tweaked feedback signals and phased-beyond-all-recognition noise bursts. Scratchy fizzles accompany the steady thump of tribal drums as they shepherd the chirps into asymmetric loops before calming them to delicately plinking ripples. “Things Will Never Be the Same” begins with haunting choral samples before bursts of static and tendrils of looped guitar squall converge on distorted vocalese to form a final glistening drone. The most surprising of them all, however, is the epic “Endless Happiness.” Recorders whistle through delay pedals, tracing out skeletal melodies in a haze of chimes and throbbing bass as cymbals roll and drums rumble through ever-shifting pulse patterns. From the slow dissolve emerges several minutes of the unaccompanied sound of water lapping across the titular beach – a stretch of serenity so unexpected that it seems more shocking and confrontational than any brick-to-the-face noise blast in the Black Dice past.

“The Dream Is Going Down” takes things even further out by merging Black Dice’s new aural versatility with their much-touted live spontaneity. The result is a seamless progression from effects-heavy freeform blitz to a glassy pool of distant vocals stretched into shimmering glissandi and shrouded in warm buzzing feedback. Without warning they hijack the Forbidden Planet oscillators and head for the woods to reenact some esoteric creation rite replete with obsessive chanting and an insistent tribal drumming. Album-closer “Big Drop” takes similar advantage of Black Dice’s fascination with sprawl and organic development by allowing fragments to drift in and out of memory as the song hurtles forward. Tremolo guitars grind away beneath muted hooting before exploding into the album’s very first blast of maniacal hardcore – a momentary fit which lasts just long enough to unsettle any pastoral notions the listener might have been gathering to this point. Through more effects tweaking, these outbursts are transformed into a time-stretched moan that collapses again into fuzzed-out yelps and a bubbling guitar miasma – a final tape-saturating lava flow before an uneasy silence.

Beaches and Canyons marks a new era for Black Dice – it’s the surprising payoff hinted at in the band’s previous recordings. Where there once was a dynamic – loud, bordering on sadistic – there is now a dynamism that encompasses everything from the whisper of water on the beach to speaker-searing meltdowns. Black Dice has loosed the noise from the bonds of hardcore and given it room to play, to drift, and to evolve into suggestive and surprising shapes. The album is less a total rethinking of the Black Dice sounds than it is a reconfiguration of its “volume and chaos” aesthetic – the radical shifts have been stretched into epics instead of crammed into schizophrenic tantrums. In this stretching process, Black Dice discovered room for beauty amidst the amped-up assault and thus created an unforeseen counterpart to the monolithic violence of their more brutal work – without sacrificing any of its energizing intensity. For a band that has built a reputation on unpredictably, the discovery of balance on Beaches and Canyons may be its greatest coup yet.