For all their tendency towards experimentation, Varona take a very meticulous approach to songwriting, arrangement and production. The result is a work of precise weirdness. W.H. Auden once suggested that poetry be defined as a clear expression of mixed feelings. By that standard, Varona's records are nothing if not potently poetic, filled to the brim with emotional ambiguity and contradiction. The band’s stylistic influences are no less mixed than the feelings their songs evoke. Barely-contained anxious spasms of screamy post-punk; frenetic, cheerfully-destructive experimentation of Downtown jazz; literary melancholy of late-20th century Russian-rock songwriting, are not so much ingredients here as deep-set roots, and the result is less a cocktail than an exquisitely strange hybrid mutant not quite like anything else springing from San Francisco’s fertile musical soil.