Please Remain Calm has its own gravity.

Technically, I’m supposed to have put down my thoughts on the DIKEMBE record already, which is quite good, but Please Remain Calm crowds out everything else floating around it inside my skull.

With a few exceptions (“Ballots/Stones”, “War On A Feeling” and “Jerry Rumpspringer”) Hostage Calm didn’t land for me. But what promise “Ballots/Stones”, “War On A Feeling” and “Jerry…” showed! If HOSTAGE CALM could improve on that, their next record would be fantastic.

Well, it’s their next record now and it is.

Please Remain Calm opens up with a one-two combo of pitch perfect power pop, “On Both Eyes” and “Don’t Die On Me Now,” which sets the pleasantly ramshackle tone for the disc. Chris Martin’s lyrics focus on the confusion and disappointment of the post-Crash America, where you can’t even move back in with your parents when you can’t find a job, if the house is underwater and it’s not just you working retail, it’s at least one of your folks, too.

The newly acoustic “The ‘M’ Word” is no less powerful, if a little more dramatic. I disagree with the sentiment that now is a particularly bad time to be young and thinking about marriage, but the band sells it. J. Robbins feels like the right choice here to produce or engineer the record. Everything sounds clear, if a little bit quiet and thin. Maybe it’s Run For Cover not getting mixed up in the loudness wars. Whatever it is, HOSTAGE CALM usefully incorporates more ornate instrumentation on the record.

What I think is the major success of the record is the biggest gamble, the almost-but-not-quite-vocals-only song “Patriot.” This isn’t entirely without precedent. “Hush” by BEDOUIN SOUNDCLASH was actually a cappella and it was quite good. “Patriot” is unsurprisingly, about the history of America through Martin’s lens. And that could be super boring, but his voice is strong enough to carry the song.

It has my favorite moment on the disc (errr…hush-hush label stream) and it is when Martin’s voice carries the moment “and drunk with pride, you hurt, you stole, but I still carried you home.” There’s only a little bit of accompaniment on the lyric, with a little juice on the “carried you home” part. In short: “Patriot” sounds like HOSTAGE CALM for your beginning choir class, or a song that would never have been assigned (but should have been) the one year I took choir in high school.

We will not speak of “Woke Up Next To A Body” because it isn’t just middling, but because it interrupts the flow of Please Remain Calm, the totality of which Jordan summed up nicely when he called it “deceptively aggressive.” It is made up for, however, by the penultimate song, “Closing Remarks,” which is as catchy as anything AVAIL ever played live, even if the Richmond (VA!) band would have to listen an awful lot of PULP to get into the mood.

Deceptively aggressive. Jordan’s right. Again and in two words, to boot. Please Remain Calm is an excellent bit of cane sugar to go with HOSTAGE CALM’s message.

I listen to Please Remain Calm right now not merely because the review ought to be sent off and I’ve long since swallowed the hooks, but because it’s a record about the irreducible, impossible arithmetic of mystification, pervasive anxiety, and relentless stimulation of American life in 2012.

I don’t agree with Please Remain Calm all the time, but I’m excited and relieved it exists. I think you’ll like it.