Led by the enigmatic producer/writer/vocalist John Congleton, the Dallas-based group first came to national attention with 2002’s "Hide the Kitchen Knives," a truly menacing conceptual piece in which sound and lyric—both obsessed with blades being drawn and the notion of cutting and being cut—were united in a brilliantly uncomfortable fashion. Two years later came "God Bless Your Black Heart," which further cemented the group as avatars of the sinister by exploring death by fire, drowning and the inevitable outcome of predator stalking prey.

The new "Now You are One of Us" continues a trend of sorts by focusing on an unnerving thematic notion and creating a musical landscape to complement that notion.

According to the album’s press release …One of Us examines the ways in which fear can be utilized as an instrument of control. Frenzied opener “We Know Where You Sleep” investigates abuse at the hands of a loved one. The next track, “The Kids Will Grow Up to be Assholes (The Kids are Not Alright),” uses the Jonestown tragedy as a metaphor for corrupt authority and its ugly consequences. Elsewhere, lyrical snatches and arcane samples observe a fear of ghosts and the paranormal. These childhood terrors are perhaps best heard on the striking one-two punch of “…And All the Candy You Can Eat” and “All Manner of Pox or Canker,” both of which unearth the dreadful underside of fairy tales, namely Hansel and Gretel (“into the oven you go”) and The Three Little Pigs (“not by the hair of your chin…I’ll have to blow your house down”).

Congleton’s creep show lyrics are complemented throughout the album by his musical cohorts, an expanded line-up of six additional musicians who craft dense layers of drunken piano, baleful violin, heavy metal guitar and thunderous percussion.

Forward-thinking even as it concerns itself with tortured spirits and sins of fathers long dead, Now You are One of Us is a dark, iconoclastic work of art.

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