Dredg is hard to dig at. Call them what you may—progressive, alternative, art-rock, weird—and it somehow never fits, like trying to squeeze King Kong into a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch jeans. Their fourth studio album, The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, is heavy, the way things used to be groovy, or bitchin’, or rad. Inspired—at least in part—by Salman Rushdie’s essay, A Letter to the Six Billionth Citizen. The album is like a convention of higher thought; only fun: a new exhibit of paintings; only less pretentious. Rushdie’s essay dealt with the far-reaching and personal impact of religion; it asked the unanswerable question “Why?” in a way that prophesied an answer. The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, like their previous albums before it, is a concept, it asks plenty of questions and raises any number of points to consider. If you have answers, if listening to it brings on a couple of questions, fine. But that’s never been the point, and it’s not here. It’s all about the journey, the paint-smeared palette as much as the final product.

The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion opens with kids singing. It ends with birds chirping over the distorted whisper of man. In between is a Jackson Pollack-like concoction of sound: brazen and bold, ethereal and esoteric, yet communal in the most gathering sense of the word. Gaven Hayes works a harmony the way smoke works its way into oblivion, Dino Campanella works over the drums the way Rocky Balboa worked over a side of beef, Mark Engles on guitar is a reincarnation of Edge when U2 was less bombastic, and Drew Roulette on bass and synthesizer is the beautifully beating heart of it all. The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion may force you to take a couple steps back; you may find yourself, hand over mouth, really looking into—or listening into, if you want to get literal— the thing, the creation, to really get a grasp on it. You might even be there for a while, especially if you’re a first timer to Dredg, and find that you keep coming back. But the end result is Wow. From top-to-bottom, The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion is one of the best albums, one of the best accomplishments of 2009.

Catch Without Arms, though solid, was more straightforward, more traditional in structure than Leitmotif and El Cielo. The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, is a return to transitions between songs—movements as they’ve called them in the past—and they are just that, moving; as moving as the songs themselves. The flawless transitions help glue everything together to create a mood, an experience, a cohesive vision, frantic as it may get. “Long Days and Vague Clues” is chaotic, a cacophony of strings and pounding drums that would make Beethoven’s ears perk, and it eases seamlessly into the soothing “Cartoon Showroom,” which then bleeds into “Quotes,” one of the finest songs Dredg has created; it’s the perfect union of what makes Dredg who they are, the sort of song that, instead of trying—and probably failing—to properly explain the band to someone else, you play for them.

I don’t get art; the universally accepted definition of the hows and whys of what the word art entails, anyway. Some say that art is the vision. Andy Warhol, and all of his cows, bananas, and Marilyn Monroes might go for that; add some color to an otherwise overlooked soup can and with one big Emeril Lagasse “BAM!” you have art. To me that seems too easy; everyone colors pictures when they’re four, why’s it all of a sudden a big deal when you’re doing it when you’re forty? Is Britney Spears an artist because she takes some lyrics written by someone else and kind of, sort of, puts her voice—as digitally “enhanced” as it winds up being—over a beat produced by someone else? Who’s to tell? Art should be harder than that: harder to earn, harder to create, harder to “get.” That’s not to say I get Dredg all of the time—what they’re trying to get at—and The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion is no different. But it sure as hell sounds good, and Dredg is sure as hell different than anything else out there. That has to count for something.