CD Packaging: Digipak. Vinyl Packaging: Single Sleeve + download card. The thing about progress is that sometimes we never recognize it until we've arrived at the end goal and reflected. That's what's so telling about the title of Native's sophomore album, Orthodox: inasmuch as it dispenses with the quartet's prior musical conventions as it tackles weighty social issues often left unchallenged by today's bands. It's an album filled with subtle intricacies for obsessives to hone in on for years to come, while equally menacing and destructive in its incisive power. In just a handful of years, Northwestern Indiana's Native have quietly built themselves a large word-of-mouth following in the underground as an incendiary live act. The iconoclast group's impeccable musicianship, ominous chords, apocalyptic vocals and innovative rhythms hit with an intensity that can only be described as akin to a white-knuckle thrill ride. There's as much suffocating darkness as there is thoughtful focus to Native's intricate song structures and pensive lyrics. There's a dark foreboding in the guitar lines simultaneously pushing and pulling, the whole band embracing and tearing apart musical convention with the unpredictability of a protest gone awry. "We set out to make it a departure from what Native used to be," Markos explains. "We wanted this to address societal flaws, not just selfish parts of our personal lives." O'Neill elaborates, "we'd burned out on that math-rock term, and lyrically too we wanted to take ourselves out of the equation. The music is calculated, but raw." Far from screaming about the big bad government, Orthodox is constructed in somewhat cryptic lyrics depicting various themes, all of them aimed at answering the album's many questions. "We hate the presentation of problems with no solution," Markos says. "It takes it one step further to offer your hand at how to solve it." Orthodox was recorded by Greg Norman (Russian Circles, Pelican) in Tolono, IL and in Chicag.......
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