Why is a band of New Mexico-raised Cervantes superfans releasing albums of Balkan-style instrumental music? And how did they get so damn good at it? Cervantine is the fifth album from A Hawk and a Hacksaw, who may be better known for projects other than their own. After two years of immersion in the traditional Budapest music scene, the duo provided the Eastern European instrumentation on Beirut's acclaimed 2006 album, Gulag Orkestar and before that, accordionist Jeremy Barnes drummed in Neutral Milk Hotel. Though Barnes and violinist Heather Trost form its core, the band's ever-changing lineup obscures the individuals involved, pushing them closer to an orchestra than a traditional indie band. The individuals are sublimated in pursuit of the band's distinctive sound, which is communal, lacks grandstanding guitar solos and typically eschews vocals to demonstrate the players' technical prowess on symphonic instruments.

One advantage to their instrumental style: A Hawk and a Hacksaw are not constrained by popular song structure, instead rambling through movements and melodic themes that are reinvigorated by new drum patterns. At eight minutes and 23 seconds, album opener "No Rest for the Wicked" takes its name to heart, beginning with a drum beat fit for an Irish step troupe and giving the strings and accordionist a cardiovascular workout. The theme repeats a few times, broken up by dissonant interludes, before the drums drop out for a few moments of recovery. Then the entire pattern begins anew. It is at once exhausting and fascinating to hear, and anyone who fails to appreciate the ways subtle instrumentation changes influence the larger sound will never write a great song of their own.

The band breeds its own style throughout the album, finding common aural influences that seem geographically impossible. "Espanola Kolo" and the title track juxtapose staccato mariachi melodies over a booming, arrhythmic tuba line. "Mana Thelo Enan Andra" feels like a home performance, with the bouzouki and doumbek occasionally overpowering English singer Stephanie Hladowski's wailing, mournful vocals. "Uskudar," a traditional Turkish song that has transcended geopolitical boundaries, sounds surprisingly close to a bhangra song, complete with quavering vocals and plucked string instruments. "Lujtha Lassu, a lullaby of suspended chords whose tension is only resolved in the final seconds of the track, is vaguely torturous but ultimately soothing, some musical power lifting with a few blessed bars of recovery at the end. "At the Vulturul Negru" is a variation on the theme heard in the opener, as quick and anxious as its predecessor but in accented four instead of uneven five. If any of these songs could be described as "danceable" by American standards, this would be it.

Part of me wants to resent A Hawk and a Hacksaw, to roll my eyes at the expats appropriating the musical traditions of the former Soviet bloc and making them palatable to American hipster types. But they treat their subject with the reverence and joy that it deserves, honoring the Balkan traditions they have learned from and updating them in a genre-bending modern American way.