Seeing Triumph of the Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death perform live can be a challenging event, to say the least. As you can pick up from the name alone, this is a band prone to run-ons: run-on titles, run-on lyrics, run-on feedback, run-on sets. At the last performance of theirs that I saw, frontman Spencer Moody and bandmate Corey Brewer threw sound, words, and various experimental tangents around like a kid picking through the dirty-clothes pile for clean socks—fragments flew everywhere with no rhyme or reason. The shows seemed to have neither a starting nor an ending point, but only a middle that kept turning over on itself, instruments and people rambling into oblivion—or at least until they were forced to make room for the next act.

I say all this because Triumph (I'm not typing that one out every time) recently released a record, Helpless, that is so carefully experimental and delicate and tarnished in all the right places that it makes me wish I'd heard the recorded material before seeing the group live, so I'd have known that Triumph is less a confrontational joke and more, as Moody explains, "a reaction to the limitations of the traditional rock band."

They're limitations he's become well aware of, even in as successful an act as his former Murder City Devils. But Triumph is no extension of the Devils' output. Instead, it's a purification of the core ugliness and sense of sadness clawing through Moody in the best of his former band's moments. It's a melancholy he sits with on some songs, leaving them wordless as piano keys clink and utensils rattle and percussion does a stuttering death march, catching up to them with vocals heavy with the syrup of slow-motion effects while Neil Young's voice echoes in the background. The record is economical with instrumentation, as the band lend the least amount of accompaniment to Moody's voice when he's tending to the salt in his wounds (against a simple acoustic guitar or loops of eerie melodies) or with violins swooning over motors that grind to a halt, stall, and wind back into motion. Elsewhere, clomping beats build and gallop off into the distance as repetition creates meditative states. Moody says that Triumph created the record to buck the verse/chorus/verse template with which he was so familiar, to "explore some less musical sounds," and to "acknowledge the disconnect between recording and live performance." By letting go of convention, he and Brewer create music somewhere between helpless and haunting. If you're open to letting go as well, Triumph will take you on a strange, fascinating trip.

New label alert: Portland's Cherchez La Femme is a women- and queer-focused label/distro company. Its early roster supports such artists as Sarah Dougher, rapper Katastrophe, and a benefit comp for Portland's Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center featuring Le Tigre, the Decemberists, and more. â– 

jennifer@thestranger.com