For years now, Portland duo Quasi has made an art form of sneaking in snarky ruminations on death and various other departures under the guise of feel-good, sing-along pop songs. Quasi's is a world where birds fly cheerily above as the heartbroken, downtrodden, or just plain crabby spend their days hovering as low to the ground as possible--making deals with the devil, planning bitter, doomed revenge, or just walking around waiting for bird shit to splash on their foreheads once again.

That formula isn't about to change with the forthcoming release of The Sword of God, Quasi's fifth album and first release for Chicago's Touch and Go label. Melancholic rage--or indifference--informs the album as distinctly as it has any other Quasi record. Harmonies soar and dip as Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss propel each other to sparkling pop heights in song after song. But The Sword of God possesses decidedly more bite than previous collaborations. This time out, the ire is turned up a notch, the desperation headed toward resignation rather than defiance, and the sadness swings lower than ever before. The music--while twinkling with bright orchestral backdrops (and again, bird sounds), making it all still sound so pretty--reveals an increasingly menacing quality, a clamoring anger; and with that seductive formulation, Quasi's own piercing sword has been honed razor-sharp.

Take "Fuck Hollywood," for instance. The song opens with old Tinseltown grandeur and pomp, sounding like the exuberant swell of notes that might accompany the opening credits of some beloved classic musical. But a cyclical song laden with death ensues.

"They've made several big-budget Hollywood movies in Portland this year, much to the inconvenience of the people who live here," Coomes explains via telephone. "Once I was trying to just get across town on my bicycle, and a huge swath of the city was blocked off so Bruce Willis could do a chase scene, and I couldn't get across town--I had to go a couple of miles out of my way to go across town just because of Bruce Willis. I actually tried to just ride straight across and sneak by the guard, until some L.A. guy came running out screaming, practically in tears, as if I was going to ruin his entire movie. Nothing was going on and there were no cars coming at that moment. So I just kept riding that day, going, 'Fuck Hollywood! Go back to L.A., you fuckers!' The song is more like, 'Fuck the Hollywood mentality of big corporate, stupid entertainment and propaganda as entertainment.'"

Happily, the entire album is backed with hallmark plot twists such as these. Later, on "The Curse of Having It All," Weiss leads off with a story of happiness and rediscovery before revealing that the song's protagonist has suffered an emotional breakdown, and the world in which she now skips happily is not the same one the mentally healthy inhabit. "Nothing's quite enough she'd say/until nothing's all she'd do all day" is a chilling line, despite Weiss' sweet singsong delivery.

The Sword of God was produced entirely by Quasi; Coomes and Weiss recorded and mixed the songs themselves in their home studios. While this provided the duo with a freedom that is evident on this grandly inventive album, it proved to be a bigger undertaking than they initially imagined. "I thought I knew a lot more about recording," Coomes confesses. "When we actually got down to the process of recording, I couldn't figure out how to make things not sound like shit. 'We'll have all the time in the world,' I thought--but we spent so much time trying to figure out how to get sounds to sound like we wanted them to sound, in the end we were pretty rushed to get it together. We were mixing two hours before FedEx closed on the deadline date." What kept the duo from handing the project over to a more seasoned engineer? "Sheer bullheadedness," reveals Coomes.

The liner notes for The Sword of God feature a quirky short story, in the form of a correspondence, written by Coomes in defense of a performing primate, now aged, who languishes on life support in a research facility and whom Coomes desperately wishes would be allowed to die. The story is humorous and studded with thinly veiled distaste for the media. I ask Coomes whether there is any hidden, autobiographical truth to the story, and he puts me in my place: "I've never really heard of an actual ape that had a recording career... that wasn't a human," he laughs. "Nah... it's a fantasy. Who knows? Maybe it's prophetic. Maybe it'll be about me."