The fine young gentlemen in the Cincinnati band Pomegranates were already alive with ideas for "Everybody, Come Outside," its sophomore, full-length album, when they visited our studio almost two years ago. They were already buzzed about what it was going to turn into, almost fantasizing about what it would look like, just as an expecting mother or father may imagine the features and the face of the little baby girl who's expanding a womb on the other side of some belly skin. They were already tired of the songs that were on the band's debut, "Everything Is Alive," and these new ideas were already tilling the soil and planting themselves, rushing into the earth and pulling the brown covers over themselves, closing their seedy eyes shut so they could grow faster than time usually allows. The songs that they were dreaming up and starting to pen now make up this scintillating concept record about a man out walking an errand of the evening only to be kidnapped by a time traveler that is all wild particles and generous parts of fantastical interpretation into a journey that is potentially never-ending. Whether it's the abducted man feeling these things or not - it could just be the space that we're all placed in when we listen to this record of a multiple voices and temperatures - we're lifted off this ground, the familiar one, and forced to feel some emptiness and loneliness, all interspersed with something wonderful and inviting. It's a feeling that there is nothing that is alone, as if that's not possible. Somehow, it's as if the abduction that happens - to this protagonist of ours - is also our abduction, and perhaps it's one for the band members as well, this getaway that happens with relatively little struggle and fight, with hollow threats. It's a great adventure that doesn't sound as if it's happening so much throughout all the realms of time and space, but out on a horizon-less ocean of blue, the kind that murders your eyes with its reflective brightness and its scary abundance, just stretching out to the places where there are no ends and only vague beginnings. It's more of a story that these four young men - singers Joey Cook, Isaac Karns, drummer Jacob Merritt and bassist Josh Kufeldt - have started to experience in their own lives, all of the drifting, all of the faint tangles of old lives quickly dissolving into the complete unknown. There are no sails, no maps or Garmins to get them anywhere. It's up to the waters and its up to the milky skies - and this time traveler - to get them to their spots, wherever those may be. Pomegranates is a band that already, over the course of two records, has shown itself to be of the highest ambition and they've already successfully executed some wonderful maneuvers, tightening a sound that is still mostly delightful experimentation. It is a sound that isn't anchored anywhere, but roams through styles and dimensions to create something that really does border on true elegance. It's the other end of a thousand nights that they bring us around to see, showing us the way they feel when the moonlights start their whites and what they do when the dawns start intruding. It's a feeling of getting as much of the good out of all that we/they have control over and yet it all seems to be dreamlike.