Once upon a time in a faraway land, masses of people would gather in fields or heaths or moors, or wherever it was that traditional English people gathered traditionally. They'd ask each other: Why aren't Echo and the Bunnymen as popular as U2? Both bands played large, stadium-sized anthems, but the Bunnymen were a more complicated and stranger beast than the Irish saints. Nowadays, people wonder aloud on the Internet: Why isn't British Sea Power the actress-marrying, silly-named-children-having, arena-filling sort like, say, Coldplay? And the answer is similar.

Whereas Coldplay will sing about how birds will fly at 344 miles per second (the speed of sound) in order to make you understand something deep and worthwhile, BSP tell tales of their favorite glaciers and the Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution of 1989. They're often too left-of-center, too odd, and too English for mass acceptance. This is a band that used to listen to recordings of John Betjeman before going on stage and sells official mugs that read "British Tea Power"—not exactly a band that follows the established star-making machinery. But everyone is well aware that machinery needs calibrating.

And so BSP has a question to ask us (although they're really asking it of themselves): Do You Like Rock Music? Over the course of their last two albums, British Sea Power has shown themselves to be a two-headed animal. The first, The Decline of British Sea Power fused the frantic side of indie-rock (shouty thrashes about Dostoyevsky) with the poppier side of the Pixies, while the second favored open, Bunnymen-esque vistas. After losing a member to the Brakes (the guy who played keyboards and ran around in a World War I helmet bashing a drum), DYLRM (Rough Trade, out now) has fused the two impulses into a true album, not just a collection of songs.

After the massed choral opener, "All In It," the best example of the updated BSP is the song that follows, "Lights Out for Darker Skies," which runs from crashing guitars through '90s Wedding Present-style UK indie to a beautifully quiet, meandering second half. Even Hamilton (BSP doesn't believe in more than one name), the second-in-charge singer/songwriter after frontman Yan, has stepped up and in "No Lucifer" and "Down on the Ground" has produced his best songs since Decline's "Blackout." Not only could DYLRM be called a return to form, British Sea Power have produced an album with the kind of majesty and skill that shouldn't be allowed to disappear solely into the hands of their cult.