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  Mobius Band - HeavenBy Daniel JohnsonNovember 2, 2007 When Junior Boys remixed "The Loving Sounds of Static" into one of the best summer love jams of 2006 for the blog-scouring indie-class, they did it by splitting the heart of Mobius Band's sound into two dripping halves and muting the rest. What was left were the band's essential strengths: on the one hand, singer Ben Sterling's slightly drawled melodies; on the other, the percolating energy of 8-bit keyboard giggles, water-colored synth pads and a darkly compressed live rhythm section. The Brooklyn-based three-piece has taken a cue from that deconstruction in creating Heaven. It's still electronics-driven, but Mobius's bionic band feel is tempered with plenty of pensively sweet pop, and it's a starker separation than before. Tour veterans by now, Heaven finds Mobius Band both flexing the hard-earned muscularity of their ensemble chops at new, anthemic levels ("Secret Language," "Control") and saddling that energy in the blown-speaker crunch of circuit-bent Casios ("Hallie," "Friends Like These"). Despite a mix that is often intimate when it should be cavernous, and a curiously back-loaded running order (the album's best tracks - "Control," "Black Spot," "I Am Always Waiting" - don't even come until the second half), Heaven is far more accessible than anything Mobius Band has tried before. For a band that's as comfortable holed up in their attic studio as they are owning a live stage, they were smart to use their love of micro texture in the greater service of this expansive and catchy new material. Heaven's sweet-natured hooks and tom tom-heavy U2-isms were clearly reverse-engineered for crowd pleasing.
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