Where 2006’s DIA was written and recorded during a period of harrowing winter seclusion in an upstate New York cabin, 2010’s Murder Dull Mind was birthed in an apartment over a sweltering summer in China where Amen Dunes’ Damon McMahon was living as an expatriate. More inward than its predecessor, Murder Dull Mind is a mostly acoustic affair, though you have to swim through fathoms of deep-layered reverb and stacked vocal harmonies before hitting the tones of McMahon’s wooden six-string. “Periodico de Ayer” opens with monk-like a cappella chants before the haunting “Diane” seeps in with washes of ghostly wails and open-tuned drones of hypnotic guitar strumming. The title track flirts with a more traditional song structure until the realization that there are no set verses and choruses — the tune brilliantly plays like a well formed stream of consciousness. McMahon plugs in on “Night Driver Sunriser” two minutes and 21 seconds of vision-blurring guitar feedback and reverb that sounds spawned from a Flying Saucer Attack session. Not even a whistled solo can keep “Yur a Liar” from ending with dark resonance.