Pixel Revolt (2005)

John Vanderslice is a Bay Area studio geek who writes beautiful songs about hideous things: serial killers, war, post-9/11 paranoia. Such topics could have made Pixel Revolt impossibly downbeat, but it's actually a relatively warm, easy-to-embrace effort: ''Continuation'' is a strutting, string-charged murder mystery, while ''Exodus Damage'' is a lovely fever dream of strings and chimes that, like most of the album, retains an undercurrent of menace. Bet you never knew a vibraphone could be so chilling.