There's a disarming honesty to the way Michigan-based husband and wife duo Windy & Carl communicate with one another. A blog post from Windy, published in late 2011, describes the making of We Will Always Be, framing it in the context of their relationship. "Yeah, we have had bumps in the road, and on occasion it seems as if we may never recover from these bumps, but we do," she wrote. That type of candor doesn't stop at the written word; it also bleeds through into the duo's music. Often their work is collaborative, at other times there are vast expanses of sound featuring Carl playing alone. Either way, this album, their first since Songs for the Broken Hearted in 2008, is executed with openness and sincerity, making it feel as if the usual barriers between audience and performer simply aren't there. When Windy & Carl lock together, it's like being privy to a great secret, imparted in a moment of intensely personal creativity.

This record shifts through three distinct phases, with a definitive beginning, middle, and end. It travels from temperate ripples at the start through craggy rock faces in the center. The close is like an impossibly smooth glide across freshly laid snow. As with most of Windy & Carl's music, the lyrics are frequently indecipherable. The emotional impact is torn from the overall feel, which shifts from rueful acoustic work ("For Rosa") to forceful, repetitive drone rock ("Fainting in the Presence of the Lord"). The spaces in-between those extremes are smudged with color, sometimes bearing the kind of drifty essence My Bloody Valentine mustered up on "To Here Knows When". Like Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher, Windy & Carl's work often resembles the sound of a couple retreating from the world in order to understand their place within it.

The way We Will Always Be is put together only adds to that feeling. It resembles an orderly dissection of the relationship cycle, where unruffled, carefree beginnings melt into discord and conflict, ultimately settling into the strange kind of parity that outsiders to any long-term relationship find hard to fathom. Their musical assimilation of that rocky mid-section, where the delicate framework of understanding built up around a couple feels as if it could crash and fall at any minute, is the most spectacular. It begins in the climb out of "Remember" and into "Fainting in the Presence of the Lord". The latter, almost 19 minutes long, is full of cadaverous twirls of processed noise, which get sucked into an atom-smashing guitar loop that trudges into the middle of the song, heaving it to a lumbering close. Whatever Windy & Carl are working out here, which even Windy's candid blog posts don't reveal, it's clearly taken them to some dark places.

Despite feeling like the work of a couple laying themselves bare, it's also music to get lost in, to block out the real world. You could stretch out for days in the quiet whirr of Carl's ring-shaped instrumental passages. That duality of purpose is one of the greatest strengths Windy & Carl possess-- the ability to conjure up contrasting feelings through their work. It's what makes an album like We Will Always Be worth returning to often, with different aspects of it coming to light depending on mood, setting, and personal circumstance. In a heartbeat it can flick from the sinister whispered vocals of "Nature of Memory" to the serene ice-drones of "Looking Glass". But it never feels like forced change. There's always a natural bridge taking you from one world to the next, like a guide taking you through Windy & Carl's singular ways, providing this album with the conceptual heft it feeds on to flourish. (pitchfork )