It's strange how one band's ambient excursions can leave you completely cold and unconvinced, while another's can transport you -- even when all of the key ingredients seem to be roughly the same.
Reformed Faction achieves something that is difficult to describe with
The War Against.... As with most genre exercises, the answer seems to lie somewhere in the small details: maybe the subtle but ravishingly beautiful hints of polyphony on "Hollerei," or the intimations of brooding malevolence lurking beneath the gritty, glitchy surface of "In Advance of the Broken Arc," or the seductive quietude of "The Rotted Stick That Screeches Lying" (one thing's for sure: the key to this album's success is not its song titles). "Cord-War Creeper" is infused with a genuine air of menace, while "Shadow Book of Flowers" sounds like low-grade chaos in an office suite being kept under tenuous control by a fascist sequencer. The title track has a regular beat -- but it seems to be in something like 7.5/4, which is frustrating but very cool. This album is full of little surprises and elegant touches like that, although it's also something you can let nibble at the edge of your consciousness while you read a book. The line that separates self-indulgent twaddle from genuinely involving and affecting subtlety is a treacherously fine one, and
Reformed Faction dance along it as if it were no big deal. Amazing.