On their sophomore album, So Happy, It’s Sad, Spirits and the Melchizedek Children divine slowburning songs that ooze with the morphic resonance of both lysergic past lives and the band’s Southern heritage. It’s perhaps not unlike My Morning Jacket taken to its most extreme conclusion, but without so much melodrama. Really, though, the band has tapped into something uniquely its own by taking an organic approach to exploring the same nether regions as those foraged by Sigur Ros and Godspeed You Black Emperor.

The album leads off suitably at its most accessible entry point, “Song Bird’s Grave,” a track that is immediate for its propulsive beat and crooned melody, but is no less evocative for it. Like the rest of the record that follows, the song seems comprised of little moments—a guitar divergence, a suspended vocal, a repeated drum shuffle—so that one easily gets lost in its enchanting details. Elsewhere, SATMC stretch out such elements so that there is an almost linear progression to tracks like the eight minute-plus “Lullabies for War” and “Copper Feather.” Of course, this would be a big snooze of hippie indulgences were songs like “Lost & Found” also not inflected with a great deal of soul, as found in ringleader Jason Elliott’s vocals and the strings of their guest contributors. It all amounts to a spellbinding album that occupies a world of its originators’ own making.