Particles and Waves is a perfect companion to the swelteringly humid summer nights that have plagued the US for the last month. Cranes' sound draws a striking ethereal beauty from a startlingly thin sound, showcasing little more than Ali Shaw's helium-assisted voice and an airy blend of acoustic guitars and electronic washes.

Cranes have been recording since the late '80s, and their experience shows in their streamlined minimalist tendencies, suggesting that their vintage has taught them to paint with a few well thought-out strokes. The resulting music is otherworldly, but sidesteps the cheap trappings of psychedelia. Instead, Particles and Waves moves along like a hallucinogenic fever-dream, hot, steamy and airborne.

Sister and brother duo Ali and Jim Shaw are responsible for most of Cranes' music. Ali's voice has the kind of childlike timbre that would be well suited to Japanese candy pop, in the same vein as Miho Hatori or Pizzicato 5, but it fits surprisingly well in this environment as a jarring foil to the instrumentation's dark moodiness. "K56" takes well over two minutes to build a rich, tortuous, distorted bassy throb; when Ali's voice finally finds its way into the mix, it's a contrast of high-range/low-range frequencies so jarring that you'll suspect you're dreaming -- or perhaps your headphones are melting. Jim's voice is much more human and textured, and he showcases it especially well in "Every Town", a languorous acoustic piece that sustains the electronic numbers' spell with only a guitar and a lot of reverb. It's quite entrancing.

Cranes will bury themselves deep in your subconscious. Many of their songs are so slow and patient that they barely register as music until the three or four minute mark, when you realize that the soft mood music in the background has become a ghostly nightmare. "Here Comes the Snow" is a perfect example: its soft drums and mild shoegazer guitar riff chug along like slugs, with Ali's voice barely climbing above a whisper. Ever so slightly, the song's languid beauty gives way to subtle yet horrifying explosions of nightmarish screeching. It's unsettling, but endlessly gratifying, like goosebumps from a cool breeze on a hot summer night.