This’ll sound farfetched to anybody familiar with the Deer Tick back catalog, plus frontman John McCauley’s side projects Middle Brother and Diamond Rugs, but believe it. The guys have defied their rep for making untamed music out of untamed excess. For new album Negativity, they shelved the drunken debauchery and even took up an interest in the more innocent qualities of pre-Woodstock pop. McCauley’s been open about recent sobering events in his life—a busted engagement, seeing his dad hauled off to jail, trying to kick the hard stuff—and he wrote these songs with a troubled mind, applying his characteristic bluntness and, from time to time, displaying uncharacteristic self-awareness. The spiky 3/4 time blues ballad “Trash” is a case in point: In a neat turn of phrase, he calls himself a “wasteful savant.” “The Rock,” “Mr. Sticks” and “Hey Doll” have their share of pleasing surprises, too, not least of which is McCauley’s buzz-saw crooning of polished melodies over the band’s feral attack and producer Steve Berlin’s bopping, horn-accented arrangements. Only occasionally—as when McCauley plays the wounded victim during the lounge pop number “Just Friends”—do things get awkward. Mostly, though, the album proves that Deer Tick has many layers.