Kevin Bronson on April 10th, 2009

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When we last checked in with local heroes Silversun Pickups, they were basking in the glow of having captured lightning in a bottle. Songs that had warmed in Silver Lake’s incubator since around 9/11 had been hatched into 2005’s “Pikul” EP, then their 2006 debut “Carnavas.” Two Top 10 singles, 350,000-plus in album sales and a couple of world tours later, the Pickups were not the kids who used to bust eardrums at the Silverlake Lounge but bona fide headliners.

Old fans – if not the newbies who seem to chant the lyrics to “Lazy Eye” as if it were “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” – had to worry during a mostly silent 2008, though. You have your whole life to write your debut album and only a few months to write your second, the adage goes, and the thirtysomething Pickups were late bloomers. “Carnavas,” bridging the sounds of ’90s noisemakers and contemporary indie-rockers, was an album of the moment, arriving quietly, mid-decade, on a small upstart label, a couple of years after Modest Mouse’s “Float On” had certified that indie rock was safe for the commercial airwaves. What would SSPU do for an encore? Shape-shift? Tread water? Pull a She Wants Revenge and reconstitute its debut?

Well, shiver my distortion pedals: Silversun Pickups have gone and made a better album. “Swoon” (due Tuesday on Dangerbird) tours the peaks and valleys of redemption and hope and darkness and melancholy, capturing, viscerally, the subtle duality of its title: You can swoon and find yourself in a very bleak place, or you can swoon and feel the rapture.

The album feels a bit like dancing in a darkened room: exhilarating, even liberating and more than little bit scary, considering you’re liable to bump into the furniture. Without drastically altering its neo-shoegazer-meets-Sonic Youth aesthetic – shifting tempos, loud/soft dynamics and circular melodies couched in guitar distortion – SSPU has created a sonic womb that belies the album’s recurring themes of disconnectedness and isolation.

“Swoon” reveals those sonics as increasingly muscular, polished and deftly arranged – the sturdy bottom anchored by Nikki Monninger’s precise basslines and Christopher Guanlao’s madman drumming never intrudes on the space created for singer-guitarist Brian Aubert’s pinched vocals or, especially, the now-more-noticeable dreamy textures from keyboardist Joe Lester. Aubert’s guitar still hurls volleys of fuzz grenades, but on “Swoon” they are aimed better. And the incorporation of strings (arranged by Will Canzeroni of SSPU labelmates Darker My Love) on four songs gives the album a decidedly cinematic air.

But if “Swoon” is a film, it’s definitely one of those almost-inscrutable foreign numbers that strains under its own weight. Aubert is still maddeningly opaque as a lyricist, stringing together seemingly desultory phrases into fleeting metaphors that fly by almost as images in a newsreel. Allusions to fires, floods and hurricanes catapult you toward apocalyptic dread. Hearts are blown open, vultures are perched, knees are bruised, throats are cut and skin is burned. On the other hand, wounds are licked, kisses are blown, seeds are planted and feelings grow.

As on “Carnavas,” you never quite know whether Aubert is being personal or observational. The single “Panic Switch” could easily reference the pressure he felt working on his band’s second album. Or it could stand as emblematic of 2008, Our Year of Mass Anxiety (not that much has changed). “Swoon’s” finest moment, “The Royal We,” is almost a concept album unto itself, with its sawed strings, driving riffs and cocksure affirmations. But at other moments, Aubert – who still sings like the little brother letting you in on a family secret – is less elusive. “Growing Old Is Getting Old” meditates on aging, and “Catch and Release” is about as sexy and slow as Silversun Pickups get: “Follow me / down the streams of sweat on your body.”

“Swoon” is not liable to turn off any of its old fans, and it’s not likely to make the occasional Smashing Pumpkins comparison go away, either. But packed as it is with radio-ready rockers, the album figures to keep Silversun Pickups in the spotlight for quite some time.

Highly recommended.

||| Live: SSPU plays Sunday at the Glass House in Pomona. The show is sold out.

||| Stream the album here.