Lo-Fantasy

Sam Roberts makes a bold move on his fifth album—and his second as The Sam Roberts Band—enlisting the production help of Youth (a.k.a. Martin Glover). Youth's credits include founding postpunks Killing Joke, producing The Verve’s Urban Hymns, and performing with The Orb. Here, Roberts and Youth take a page from the Arcade Fire playbook and ramp up the dance-floor grooves, with earth-shaking bass lines and mammoth synths bringing a super-glitzy production to life. A week of intense pre-production in Montreal led to a serious material overhaul and a demand that songs hit with immediacy. The resulting tracks jump out of the speakers in ways designed to ignite the party and potentially confuse longtime fans. Yet no matter how much production flash there is, songs such as “Never Enough,” “We’re All in This Together," and “Human Heat” still work as songs; if anything, the electric touches bring the hooks more alive. For adventurous souls, there are serious remixes thrown in as bonus material. Just hearing the various remixes of “We’re All in This Together” sheds insight into how elastic The Sam Roberts Band have become.