But this is the album's strange and private glory: most things that "defy description" don't really do so at all. They just exceed a given writer's capacity for praise. OnOffOn defies description because it plays its cards so close to its chest, or perhaps because it does not really have any cards to play at all. Maybe it isn't really playing in the first place. But we, when we came to listen to it, thought that playing was the whole point of the thing in the first place. In the tension between our expectations and the gliding, occasionally bursting, semi-drone half-jangle that Mission of Burma provides, we find something without much in the way of analogues. What can I tell you? I find it interesting, and confusing, and "attractive" in a real sense of the word. It's strange. It's not like the other stuff I listen to. It isn't aiming at your heart or your head or your gut. I don't even know where it's aiming, really.

It's good.