Hiber by Auburn Lull

In their six years of dormancy, Lansing Michigan's Auburn Lull have patiently refined a distinguished and highly idiosyncratic vision of celestial minimalism that began with 1999's landmark debut Alone I Admire. Long regarded as unsung heroes of listless shoegaze and vibrant drone-pop, to confine the current trio to such terrestrial descriptors would be simply unfledged. Rather, the five selections that comprise the Hiber EP reinstate the band's timelessly melodic guitar whispers, now gracefully accentuated by a nimble sense of restraint equipped not with the mono-vision of just another shoegaze band, but with the stereoscope of a living legend.

"Moterm," a brief palette cleanser of looping melancholy cut from Robin Guthrie's silk-lining sets the scene for "CA1," a ten-minute suite of focused transcendence through sustained strings and washes of elegiac light. From the life-affirming highs to the consciousness questioning lows, the group conducts a desolate, miasmic symphony for the hollow.

B-side opener "Sosna," is a modest but expansive segue into "Hiber," a genuine mini-epic of sorts that resembles a piano exploding underwater, gently splintering into a thousand, floating and fractured flecks of sound. The scene is both beautiful and atrocious. This all leads to the solemn but resolved closer "Static Partition," whose chords of nuanced remorse and glorious grief waft through the air in a near-tangible arc.