After some laughter, the song “Hints and Omens” begins with a swirling sci-fi refrain, a keyboard-pulsing “space-themed” trill that could be a stand-in for the promising vistas of Utopian worlds concocted straight to VHS in the 1980s. It’s a little broad, a little too on-the-nose, and that seems to be the intent. Within a minute, the trill remains faintly in the background, but the forefront of the composition swells with a different, more nuanced kind of positive inflection. Toying with synths, piano, treated percussion, and a touch of horns low in the mix, the duo Inventions map out their sonic utopia, sounding like a cross-over campaign between Vangelis and Mogwai, maybe with more than a few touches of Boards of Canada thrown in for good measure. And while, yes, the piece continues to grow in scale, adding strings, it always resonates with a punchy and immediate kind of optimism, something as reductive but memorable as that trill. Its structural haziness, however – the blurring of the line between dream and reality – makes it wholly other. Sonically and in terms of initiation, it’s a wondrous call to order.

Inventions – the project of friends Mark T. Smith of Explosions in the Sky and Matthew Cooper of Eluvium – have been smudging the lines between dream and reality and, sonically, the grandiose and the intimate since 2014. On the duo’s third full-length LP, Continuous Portrait, Smith and Cooper do best when they are debating, in real-time, how to blur the lines. Take “A Time in My Life”, which falls near the end of the nine-track offering. There are Cooper’s signature touches of ambiance, played with an ear for detail – a little exhalation of sound, a mechanical thrum gently caressing the scenery. But the central motif, which is sometimes a solemnly strummed guitar and sometimes a piano, is emotionally devastating and resonant stuff, bold to the same degree that the sound-pulses on “Hints and Omens” were scene-setting.