Palm Sunday’s latest release, a two-song single, is a brief but generous taste of what this impressive Chicago-based duo is cooking up. Heavily rooted in 60’s baroque pop, these two tracks showcase a full spectrum of influences and directions. The songs differ from one another in tempo, mood, and approach, but both exist in that lightly mind-bending realm of old-school psychedelia.

“Bleeding Cross” shimmers like light on the surface of a lake, its twinkling melodies cascading and caroming off each other. It’s a callback to giants of the genre like The Zombies and The Byrds, of course, but with an updated fidelity that also converses with more recent purveyors Belle and Sebastian, the Lemon Twigs, and Brian Just. It’s only a two-minute song, the entire final minute is devoted to a coda of Turtles-esque ba-ba-ba’sthat wind their way through a progression allergic to a key. The incessant shifting of chords and root notes makes for a delightfully unsettling listen.

B-side “Airplane Crash” continues the unsettling theme with a lower-fidelity, slower-paced, stop-and-start dirge of layered harmonies and delayed organs (nee synth strings and flutes). The drum track sounds like a loop that’s been deliberately slowed to a crawl.

Both of these songs unsettling in the sense that they shift underfoot, keeping you on your toes by refusing to obey the rules the songs make for themselves. These are choices made with an excellent ear for the genre and a fantastic grasp of the theories that make the genre such a lasting and important corner of the musical world.

Palm Sunday has released a number of singles prior to this two-song outing. All of them are worth a listen, but “Bleeding Cross / Airplane Crash” is a firm step forward in an intriguing direction.