Largely recorded in a motel room in Overton, Nevada, City of Refuge is an uneasy, asymmetric weave of sung songs, chants, electronic noise solos and spaghetti-western guitar interludes.

City suggests a film soundtrack, with overture, mood-setting and plot-development songs, intermission, character studies, and themes of resolution and reconciliation.

A narrative propelled by yearning, passion, dislocation, ambiguity, regret, false redemption, possible true redemption, cryptic symbolism and other art film obligatories, this time you're liable to sit numb and silent through the credits as the theater empties.

The difference between frontman Ray Raposa's landscape and more familiar backlot scenes might be this: you believe what you've heard and seen because your third ear intuits that he didn't contrive any of it.

City, then, is no longer only music, but emotional catharsis, and we, too, long for a City of Refuge.