The third outing from Annapolis-based Tall Firs finds Dave Mies and Aaron Mullen returning to their guitar duo origins while maintaining the raw honesty of 2008's Too Old to Die Young.

The 11 tracks that make up Out of It and Into It are deconstructed almost to the point of helplessness.

Moody and meandering, they wander through the daylight like shell-shocked cave-dwellers, looking for anything remotely familiar to grasp onto.

Songs like "Vertigo" and "Suffer So Long" flirt with spacey, summer folk bliss, but come off sounding like old Church demos cut by Palace-era Will Oldham.

To be fair, Mies and Mullen have successfully mined this kind of temporal, freak-folk territory before, but Out of It and Into It feels more like a step backwards than a cerebral expansion.