The best song this week is "Day Eleven" by The Life and Times

“No One Loves You Like I Do” is the dark and awesome and creepy new record from The Life and Times. It tells a story of sorts, of obsession and possession and obsession with possession, and love that’s not always the healthiest two-way love. It digs below the surface of sweet-sounding phrases like “I love you--forever” to the subtext of “whether you like it or not.” And it has a great cover.

I’d heard ahead of time from Wags: “Day Eleven -- you have been warned.” And oh boy, it delivers on that promise. Chris Metcalf puts in perhaps his finest drum performance in an already highly accomplished discography, a funky, bouncing kick drum pattern that gives me shin splints just listening to it. The robotic right foot pounding and the way he keeps the hats going through the technical but flowing fills display his virtuosity and his ability to play dead nuts in the pocket, leaving jaws slack but booties shaking. Keyboards plink and guitars pluck through the ascending theme that runs through a number of songs on the record, a musical reminder of the off-kilter declaration of love from two songs ago that ties together the loosely woven narrative.

Then the vocals start in, multi-tracked and haunting. Harmonies and melodies and countermelodies accumulate and build, floating in from all directions into a whirlwind by the end. The delay that comes in on the word “call” at 2:13 is so good it makes me uncomfortable. Then all of a sudden everything drops out except for some lone keyboard chords, and I’m almost expecting a segue into Underworld’s “Born Slippy.” But of course that doesn’t happen, Metcalf brings the groove back as vocals kaleidoscope and you’re like “yeah, this is sweet.” And then the layers fade, they put the drums in another room for a couple of measures, then cut them off completely and the song comes to a nice end.

Except for that the hi-hats say “wait, we’re not done yet!” and a cascading fill introduces the best moment on the record when at 4:09 THE FUZZ enters -- holy amazing tones, Batman. The riff is a descending exercise in heaviness with speaker-searingly fat, fuzzed-out tones. It’s huge. You’ll hear it plenty this summer wafting from my back porch over the Avondale neighborhood, and your ears will smile.

The best song this week is “Day Eleven” and if The Life and Times are coming to your town, which they probably are, you should go and see them play it live. And you should probably not go to the men's room just before they're about to play it or you'll miss the first minute or two of it. But who would be stupid enough to do that? Not this guy, that's for sure.