With 2010's Pyramid of the Sun, Maserati finally completed its transition from standard post-rock Sturm und Drang to a sort of celestial dance-rock, sounding something like the world's tightest jam band. Now, in the face of personal tragedy, they've returned to that path with Maserati VII.

As on Pyramid, most of VII's songs are built around brief synth loops, which provide the backdrop and momentum for a growing (and diminishing, and growing) wall of interlocking guitar and bass figures. The drums mostly exist to provide a steady backbeat, with room for occasional fills, and in that, Cinemechanica's Mike Albanese is a worthy heir to the late Jerry Fuchs. The band's playing is impressively precise, as if it were computer-sequenced, and indeed in both riffs and tone Maserati seems to draw less from its old post-rock peers than from electronic dance music, Kraftwerk and Trans Am's detached techscapes, and old-school video game soundtracks. (The latter influence seems especially appropriate, considering Albanese's part in local video game cover band Bit Brigade.)

Much of the album treads familiar ground, and there's nothing here like the industrial noise of Pyramid's “Ruins,” but we do get a bit of a shake-up in the form of a late-album trilogy. First, there's the uncharacteristically airy “Solar Exodus,” which could almost be the soundtrack to a '70s space documentary and comes with the surprise infusion of vocoded chant-singing. Then it's the dreamy, drumless ambient track “Lunar Drift,” like something from side 2 of Low, followed immediately by the stomping instrumental metal of “Earth-like,” which sounds almost like a tighter version of Pelican, or the successor to Mogwai's “Glasgow Mega-Snake.” With VII, Maserati covers all its bases, and does it well.