There's a real physicality to Martin Dosh's last name, like "bash" or "dash." Dosh's Wolves and Wishes, on the other hand, is ephemeral and hard-to-grasp stuff, with countless ideas interwoven into a beguiling, often jazzy tapestry. "Bury the Ghost," for example, is a pastoral hum underpinned by skittering, swinging drums. "If You Want to, You Have To" veers into searing Neu!-styled Krautrock, but Dosh follows it with nearly 10 minutes of kitchen-sink ambience on "First Impossible." Elsewhere, on "Wolves" and "The Magic Stick," he even plays with '70s fusion, acid jazz and minimalism, and "Food Cycles" starts out light and whimsical before descending into darkness. To his credit, Dosh avoids the pitfalls of kitsch that could have sunk the project, sticking instead to experimental (but accessible) melodies. This is post-rock in the truest sense, and it plays out like a concept album about squeezing a square peg into a round hole.

-- Joshua Klein