Album Review: Portugal. The Man - Evil Friends

If you've been following the prolific career of Alaskan prog-pop luminaries Portugal. The Man since day dot, you'd be forgiven for going into their seventh full-length, Evil Friends, with guards well and truly up. After four exhilaratingly diverse albums, their next two efforts – 2010's American Ghetto and 2011's In The Mountain, In The Cloud – showed signs of a band running out of ideas, plagued by a nagging vibe of effortless sameness so out of step with the expansive, exploratory and experimental vibes that had gone before. 

Thankfully, Evil Friends marks a departure from the path of mediocrity and, largely, a return to form, highlighting Portugal's trademark talent for throwing everything at the wall and having it stick in a way that, for all its disparate elements, resembles cohesiveness, and one has to imagine that Danger Mouse's role as producer had some bearing on helping the group regain their sense of ambition. 

The result is one of their most wide-ranging, yet sonically-polished albums to date: there's the psych-drenched (Plastic Soldiers, Atomic Man, Holy Roller [Hallelujah]), the sasstastic and horn-dappled (early highlight Creep In A T-Shirt, Waves), and the grungy and driven (the title track, the radio edit of which regrettably loses its reverb-soaked slow burn of an intro). The chilled-out stroll of Modern Jesus, as well as its impossibly catchy singalong value (a quality revisited with a campfire-bound edge in Sea Of Air), is another obvious high point.

With a renewed sense of depth, dynamics and a return to the penchant for carefree cacophony found on earlier releases, Evil Friends is a godsend for Portugal fans new and old alike.