Reasons why calling Universal Truths and Cycles a "return to form" is not technically accurate, and beside the point, at any rate: Because it's scruffy at the edges, but shiny in the middle, not so much a rejection of the studied studio slickness of Isolation Drills and (especially) Do the Collapse as it is a refinement, taking the parts that work and shit-canning the rest. Because it sounds more like Isolation Drills than Alien Lanes or Bee Thousand; hidden among those nonsensical song titles is an album just as personal and passionate as Isolation Drills, lightened up, slightly, by the fact it wasn't recorded in the middle of a divorce. (Among the remnants that remain: "Does it hurt you, to love, I mean?" he asks on "Storm Vibrations," sort of a somber sequel to Isolation Drills' "The Brides Have Hit Glass.") Because the strings and things are still there, continuing Pollard's clever complication of his prog-pop songs. (Not a surprise: "I want the whole next album to kind of be like 'The Enemy," Pollard said last April, referring to one of Isolation Drills' highlights.) Because it doesn't matter who releases Pollard's songs, what titles he gives them, how they're recorded or anything else: He's a mountain of melody that no one's been able to climb higher than the tree line yet.