Upon seeing My Sad Captains’ latest album title, it’s tempting and reflexive to recall the opening line of Charles Dickens’ classic A Tale Of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. Be that as it may, the sentiment isn’t too far off the mark here as the band confronts head on the erosion of a relationship and the conglomerate of messy and contradictory emotions that accompany it. On Best Of Times, My Sad Captains seem to have resolved the genre-hopping from their prior outing, 2011’s Fight Less, Win More, by not really picking any one of them and running with it but, rather, returning to the drawing board and crafting a different sound all together with flecks of these previous exercises.

Best Of Times is impeccably crafted at a number of turns, from the ambience to the song structures, ensuring a far more cohesive whole this time around. The album’s sound is rich as burnished mahogany, well-balanced by steady rhythms, a clearly present but never overbearing low end, and clean and nimble guitars. There is scarcely a hair of distortion across the entire album, as pulsing and vacillating synths serve only to add to the billowed backdrop. Admittedly, the attention to consistency and craftsmanship can be conducive to ambiguity from song to song, but stick with the album a bit and the fine details begin to emerge. The aforementioned synths are one of the novel intricacies employed here as they keep the songs transient while the band tends to become very metered, no doubt a remnant of prior exploits in Krautrock. The brass that subtly surfaces at the tail-end of “All Times Into One”, and reappears more prominently in “Extra Curricular”, offers a nifty tinge of chamber pop to shake up the sound.

Having tipped past the halfway point by “Extra Curricular”s close, the sonic lavishness begins to toe the line of becoming overbearing, making the acoustic “All In Your Mind”, and its brief but sublime guitar solo, a welcome respite. Working hand in hand with the clockwork-like instrumental, “Keeping On, Keeping On”, these songs ensure the album’s latter half is decidedly lighter. The two tracks also work to neatly frame the swirling centerpiece, “Hardly There”, where the band stretches out into psych territory over its wooly second half.

If there’s any drawback to the album, it’s that the band’s clear attention to craftsmanship results in playing it too cautious, stifling the emotional connectivity of the album, which is a shame given the vast potential of its subject matter. While lyrically, Ed Wallis hits pay dirt time and again conveying a bevy of sentiments – from the sting of vulnerability (“now that you know my life / we’ll call it quits”) to inescapable, all-consuming memory (“it feels like you’re everywhere / meanwhile I’m hardly there”) – his vocal restraint and the carefully measured environs sap his words of some of their emotional resonance.

My Sad Captains shaking off the fetters of sonic indecision and settling on a sound, particularly one as fine as this one, is certainly a positive sign and foot in the right direction. Wallis has no issue articulating difficult emotions with his words, now he and the band must translate that into a fully engaging and affecting presentation. Wallis quietly protests on “Wide Open”, “I wonder why you feel the need to talk so loud/like there isn’t anybody else around”; My Sad Captains have got the words, the sound, and the craft, now if only they’d try a little harder to get everyone’s attention.