Not to be a name-dropper or anything, but I remember a conversation I once had with indie-rock deity Stephan Malkmus where I nearly broke down in tears explaining my love of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, largely hanging its relative merits upon its being “all over the place” sonically and thematically. Much to his credit, Mr. Malkmus had a qualifier to introduce to the simplistic way in which I had amateurishly confirmed his greatness. “All over the place, but in a good way,” he added, making sure that I realized that some albums do, in fact, veer from different tempos and textures with little rhyme or reason, making them more unlistenable and disjointed than eclectic and balanced. Anybody can be “all over the place.” It takes an artist to do it “in a good way.”

Here, on their second full-length release, Viva Voce are, indeed, “all over the place.” From swirling symphonic pop to classic indie-rock guitar grooves and crackling lo-fi ballads, the husband-and-wife duo of Anita and Kevin Robinson leave footprints all over the stylistic map, rarely stopping long enough to let their creative heels sink into the ground. As such, the album’s 15 tracks can nearly be cut into quadrants, each representing a slightly different configuration of the album’s working ethic.

The opening symphonic sweeps and piano figures of “Fashionably Lonely” soon drop into a mélange of electronic blips, finger-picked guitar and banjo, and fluttering mellotron, with cooing boy/girl vocals delivering a soothing (possibly sarcastic) affirmation of solitude. The gratuitously hooky “One in Every Crowd” follows, overlaying a background orchestral lilt with a hypnotic two-chord guitar groove that rings like Sleater-Kinney without the politics. A hazy love ballad follows with “Red D-Lish,” falling somewhere between the aesthetics of the first two entries with soothing atmospherics awash with strangulated guitar crescendos. Still, just as the listener is lulled into a pristine stupor, another punchy rocker arrives with garbage disposal distortion and a muffled sing-along to draw you back to the terrestrial plane.

Throughout, the production is hazily lush, Anita Robison using her sweet caramel croon to imbue a variety of moods, reassuring on the escapist lo-fi lullaby of “Perpetual No” as she is questioning on the closing “Let’s Bend Light.” And as much as their sound is comprised of a manicured sprawl, maneuvering through space debris in the beautifully sighing “The Tiger & How We Tamed It,” some of their best tracks happen to be their most concise. With compact tambourine shaking “Best Thing Ever (Maybe Not)” taking little more than a guitar groove and the loud/soft dynamic to carry their best melody. Still, it’s the contrast between the two competing poles of their ethic, both the shimmeringly layered and the straightforwardly simple, that makes the album work on multiple levels and separates them from the increasingly clouded waters of Flaming Lips imitators.

At 15 songs, the album is refreshingly free of filler, filling up most of its empty space with worthy distractions. The arrangements are clever and imaginative, if not entirely unique, one minute reproducing the glassy keyboards of Radiohead, the next the percussive pyrotechnics that erupt all over the orchestral sweep of other tracks. Derivative it may be, but it’s also patently unpredictable, making it a consistently enjoyable if not groundbreaking record. So in the final estimation, it’s no White Album, but Lovers Lead the Way! is all over the place “in a good way.”