While most heavy bands aim for a sound like a Mack truck, Anberlin are more like a jet-plane. There is a pulse-racing restlessness at the heart of their music that, like Muse, makes for excitement, rather than mere heaviness. Never Take Friendship Personal was a leap from their debut, cementing a brilliant mix of oomph and sparkle. This is not a leap again, but with the band growing stronger, and Aaron Sprinkle’s production crystallising all the highs and lows, this new album more than matches its predecessor.

After a Hendrix-like guitar solo intro, proper opening song “Godspeed” comes thundering out of the blocks, much like the title track did on Never Take Friendship Personal, with singer Stephen Christian shouting “burning down Neverland, scatter the ashes” as some sort of call-to-arms.

Part of the album’s thrusting drama comes from the fact that they take the songs into unexpected places, throwing in vocal left-turns, and blasts of melody without warning. Many of the songs start with harsh guitar sounds, such as the siren-like wail that opens “Hello alone,” only to evolve into something far more melodic. “Dismantle.Repair.” sitting quietly near the end of the CD, starts off innocuously enough, with restrained, strummed guitar chords and then dives into a dark riff bolstered by a rain of cymbals. But the chorus startles with a high-pitched but forceful vocal like a burst of fireworks, and then, like fireworks, rivets your senses so that you don’t want it to stop. This is a band working the theatrical potential of this kind of music to perfection.

There’s more than a passing resemblance to late-80s pop-metal of the Bon Jovi kind. In comparison, production values are chalk and cheese, but in the big choruses, “whoa” backing vocals and acoustic guitar strum-alongs incorporated into the loud drums and electric guitar riffs of heavier styles, one can trace a lineage back. Despite some obvious faults, that music had an infectious energy. On Cities Anberlin pulse with creativity and Christian sounds at times like there is so much to sing about that he can’t fit it all into the song, making for one of his and his band’s most individual traits—his tendency to jam a string of words into a cascading run of notes, like an avalanche of melody.

His lyrics can take some getting used to, initially sounding like Dashboard Confessional—all poetically cloudy—but further investigation shows him to be clever at telling a story through layers of imagery. At times he sings unambiguously about some dark topics, much like his emo contemporaries, but he is looking in, as it were, rather than wallowing in it. A song like “There is no mathematics to love and loss” (a typically abstruse title) documents a marriage breakdown with no resolution. But in contrast with much emo that equates life with living death, he sings in “Alexithymia,” “there’s more to living than being alive.” He also plays the angry preacher, in “Adelaide” criticising the subterfuge of a lover, and in “Reclusion” sings, “You’re sick as all the secrets you deny/Sins like skeletons are so very hard to hide.”

“The unwinding cable car” tackles the youth despair thing (often entwined with emo) and in some particularly empathetic lyrics addresses someone hiding behind their hair who is “self-absorbed” but forgets “the prayers that have already come about,” and that God’s grace makes us “brilliant” (as in “gem-like,” rather than “clever”). The lyrics “Don’t drop your arms/I’ll guard your heart” match, in their gentle care, the gem-like brilliance of the acoustic guitar, and the way the whole is sweetness and light. They could have added strings and solos and all sorts of bombastic production, but the song is beautifully restrained, merely adding a brisk drumbeat, as a number of Christian’s overdubbed melodies intertwine.

“Inevitable” does add the strings to acoustic guitar, but is both playful and cautious, and the lush sound is entirely appropriate for a song that nostalgically remembers the innocence of youth and first romances. Just listen to much praise and worship music to hear how hard it is to do emotion without making it sound corny and cheesy.

Cities shows a band flying high, juggling the emotional, the melodic and the powerful perfectly. Music can be deconstructed and analysed, but sometimes the whole mysteriously makes for more than the sum of the parts. In other words, there is a spark, a spine-tingling, that happens when music arrives, dropped seemingly from the hands of God. Anberlin, though superficially similar to many in the Tooth and Nail roster, have, in two successive albums, made a case to be regarded amongst the best their genre currently has to offer.