The Double

There are two salient types of unsettling albums: the kind made by, say, a German teenager with a spectacularly bad frog sample, and the kind made by the more mentally infirm, intent on spreading paranoia and disquiet. Loose in the Air sides with the latter as an ice cube down the listener’s back. It’s an album in which each song’s noises and notes match its musical theme — almost to a fault. So we get the deranged feedback and the recalcitrant keys, but most importantly, the unorthodox, kitchen-sink percussion that manages to simultaneously keep beat and consternate. The whole sounds like a vaudevillian carnival of hyper-paranoid Doors covers. Not easy, but inexorably interesting listening.