The Knife

Tomorrow In A Year (Mute, 02.2010)

For: all brave explorers

Byline: The polarizing double-album based on the life and observations of Charles Darwin. The most heady and ambitious album of the year.

If you saw this, last year you may have gotten some idea in what direction The Knife were heading. But nothing, I expect, could have prepared us for this. Tomorrow In A Year is brave. Very brave. Even for a band who has laced their brightest pop moments with a sense of misanthropic dissatisfaction with the genre, who would have guessed the follow up to Silent Shout would be a sprawling opera that charts Charles Darwin's theory of evolution from single celled organism to fully fleshed human beings in just over 90 minutes? Granted this album has been discussed to death, hailed and derided, probably burned in effigy somewhere in the deep south, so why now, should I take up the cross of trying to review this record? Well, I have listened to it thrice and I need to be validated. I need to tell someone about this, even if just discussing it conceptually. This is a record that deserves to be heard. By everyone. Just make sure you have an hour and a half to kill, and really nice headphones/speakers. This is not a car album, nor does it lend itself to any type of portability, don't take this jogging with you. Every song demands to be played in the sequence it was designed for. Tomorrow In A Year is a journey. So let's begin.

First, conceptually, you will probably not find a richer album this year. The music traces the evolution of humankind, sticking closely to Darwin's Theory of the Origin of Species recounting instances from both his observations and personal life. The album starts with scattershot of buzzing electronics, aleatoric percussion, oscillating cicada-like drones before we feel a faint pulse of life, the vestiges of a tiny single celled organism struggling through the primordial stew before Kristian Whalin's gorgeous mezzo-soprano voice announces a call to life. Kristian Whalin's voice is the vehicle that carries the narrative for the first half of the album and is an important accompanist in the conquered new world of the second half of the album. But for now we living amongst cells dividing, rocks crystalizing, primeval amoebas growing vestiges. Liquid crawling synths frequently visit the upper register in washes or blips, while low-end frequencies spawn and multiply below in a tide pool of pregnant tonal variations. For as "atonal" as this half of the album is there are wealths of downright enjoyable moments, sounds, seconds, mutations that make this a singular listening experience.

We visit the pliocene epoch for a brief, transitionary moment, where Swedish singer-songwriter Johnathan Johansson narrates the receding of the glaciers and the bubbling up of vertebrate life in an expressive lilt. With "Variations of Birds" we get our first taste of noisy, chaotic, confusing pro-backbone life. Angry dissonance of manipulated feedback alternately oscillate and squeak, while Johansson's voice floats over the squalor. The lyrics up to this point seem to be coming from a narrator coming to these revelations/observations at the same time we are grasping the conceptual thrust of the album. Darwin, our subjective narrator, states, "so that there are more than three types of birds that use their wings for more than flying/The Steamer has paddles/the penguin has fins/and the ostrich spreads its plumes likes sails to the breeze". The next few songs find The Knife tracing the evolution of the bird from studio mimicry of field recordings of Amazon birds to a swarming, overwhelming drone of flapping wings and insect buzzing in "Schoal Swarm Orchestra".

With that we are off to the holocene and beyond. "Annie's Box", written for Darwin's daughter Annie who died when she was 10, is a lamentful, elegiac opera piece sung by Whalin that is infused with the albums first sense of raw humanity. Sadness. One emotion that is communicable between every race and (evidence points to) species. This is an interesting move into a world populated by humans, a personal grievance over losing someone so close. After this announcement we are introduced to the natives. A pounding timpani roll introduces the first of the albums beat (in a primal sense) driven songs on "Tumult". The terse percussion creeps closer like suspicious tribesmen or AK-47 carrying soldiers, suggesting that the second most shared emotion is fear. Especially the clannish fear of the unknown once we separate into colonies. "Colouring of Pigeons" start a three song stretch of songs by The Knife as we know it. Punctuated by Whalin's percussive "ohs" and "ahs" a tribal beat drives the song into familiar territory before a low-end synth rips across the headphones announcing that the siblings Dreijer were in fact at the helm of this project the whole time. Karin Dreijer-Andersson's unforgettable voice comes in at about three minutes thus starting the third act. An unspecified time that seems to both in awe and in possession of sage-like wisdom that either seems to be witnessing civilization growing rapidly around them, boldly conquering and dividing itself like a single celled organism, or a narrator at the end of the very last epoch of humankind explaining to us the last days in the history of this race. Followed up by "Seeds" and ending with "Tomorrow In A Year", this suite effectively completes the arc.

And there we have it. Conceptually the album is massive, but even more so musically. After listening to the album three times all the way through I don't hesitate to say this is The Knife at the top of their game, making the album they always had the potential to make. Who knows, this could be the best album of the year or will be recovered as a faithful history of our race by a group of interstellar explorers after our civilizations demise.

Ryan H.

Keith Canisius

Waves (Darla, 10.09)

For: M83, Cocteau Twins, Panda Bear

Byline: The warmest shoegaze/dream-pop album this side of the analog divide. Totally underexposed and more than worth your attention.

Waves by Keith Canisius could be one of the most slept on albums of the past year. I'm not saying that because The TOME is late aboard the Canisius train but because of the relative dearth of coverage on the interwebs. This is downright criminal for something as good as the Danish Canisius to languish in obscurity when this album deserves to be heard. Keith Canisius was first brought to my attention by his remix of Aarkitca's "Autumnal" off the In Sea Remixes album. I listened to that track an unhealthy amount of times, being thrilled with Canisius' keyed up vocals and 80's shoegaze guitars, ethereal wave synths, and ironic-aware Top Gun riffage. It is safe to say that what I loved about that track shows up in spades on this album, but what really struck me about Waves is the multi-faceted directions he takes his influences. Canisius filters the thick synth pad and ambient guitar work of 80's shoegaze bands and delicate melodies of dream-pop through the nu- gaze of M83's reliance on heavy electronic manipulation. The result is something warm and hazy, like the obscured sun on the album cover. When separated, these two influences unfortunately play a little to close to the script, with the near Cocteau Twins sounding "Diving Day" and the Mew backwardness of "Eternal Moments". When Canisius takes complete ownership over his songs and combines both generations take on wall-of-noise ambience, they swirl together to create something wholly forward-thinking like any of the new "wave" artists spawning every month on the internet and aurally nostalgic like an 8mm film. Every track is saturated with layers of stereo-lapping synth warmness and meticulous attention to detail. "Oceans Oceans" is hands down the catchiest track on the album with a hook that has the shelf life of a twinkie bar. Title track "Waves" shows that the reach of Animal Collective, especially Panda Bear's Person Pitch has extended beyond our shores and is infecting (in the good sense) the output of European artists. In many ways, Waves has a lot in common with that album, both share a timeless sense of wanting to capture past moments and both sound ridicoulsy inviting, like you want to spend the rest of your summer vacation in the bath-water warm soundscapes of each track. The fortitious timing of this album couldn't be any better (even if it is several months late) as spring is finally here. These things have a way of just happening.

Ryan H.

Keith Canisius Myspace

FUR

Witches (Waaga, 02.2010)

For: Boards of Canada, Manitoba, BRE'R

Byline: An intriguing release from the freshly minted Waaga label’s crew of experimental musicians, Bryce Isbell's debut album combines a wealth of sonic variety with a nearly obsessive attention to tonal texture and volume. The result is a vast expanse of ambient space floating atop vintage Boards of Canada electro-beats.

There’s no question the songs of Denton’s Bryce Isbell (aka FUR—all caps now, mind you), is meant to take the listener to another place, as is often the case with good electronic music. There’s a certain skill required to create music that feels truly three-dimensional—physically deep, thick, and open. The keys here are texture, layers, and volume. FUR’s technique is to combine a wealth of sonic textures with a near obsessive attention to detail on each and every one of these tracks, massaging and stretching synths and percussive elements to mold around one another. The end goal is clearly met—on Witches, FUR has successfully created a visual, environmental ambience with each track. When listening, however, some inevitable questions definitely remain—where exactly are we, and what are we doing here?

And these are valid concerns. One problem is that little of the album relates back to its referenced titles. One may listen to a track like “Swimming” and hear the trudging beats that juggle dizzyingly back and forth, the screeching hisses of steam, the lightly chimed major chords and…we’re swimming? “Friends of Friends” is another odd one - an opera singer’s voice is sampled and placed amid police sirens. Make no mistake, it’s a cool effect, but where are we now, and why are these two in the same room? “Tunnels” provides another puzzle: the act of being in an underground corridor is transformed into a grandiose action-film chase scene. “Lackadaisical” is a whole other story... maybe not such a good idea to actually call one of your songs "lazy," especially when the track is anything but: relaxing, mellow, laid back? Yes, yes, and yes - but it's also a masterfully moody and meditative piece of work, full of atmospheric, bendable synths, and an Air-like groove that floats right along.

The misnaming of tracks is but a petty crime, though. The real issue here is whether or not it’s worth finding yourself within these ambient environments at all. The good thing is, for much of the album, exploring these soundscapes is an overwhelmingly pleasant experience. Witches feels like the rift between a satellite and its home base. An open air of frequencies that translate collages of static with brief glimpses of holographic images that flicker to life only to disappear again in the starlight. Unfortunately, FUR doesn’t always deliver on this front either. Songs create these soundscapes and let them just sort of sit there. “Blood” is probably the most troubling cut, starting, coasting on, and clumsily ending around a basic major triad, all the while disguising itself as complex with noodling synths that accomplish little in the way of actual sonic progression. The beat (an area where FUR excels in other spots on the album) does little to make the experience worthwhile, a stuttering mess that feels bloated and overwhelmed when sized up with its harmonic counterpart....

...In an attempt to make a broad, sweeping evaluation of FUR, one could compare this album to Manitoba’s 2001 record, Start Breaking My Heart. Though his talent was never in question, the bedroom-electro results of Dan Snaith’s debut pointed more to its source material than it did to his own music. All it took was one more record for the artist to explode out of this shell and really use that skill toward something utterly unique and creative. I have high hopes for FUR—the pieces are all there, you can tell the guy listens to the right stuff, and it’s great to hear a debut that’s this polished and sonically detailed. What’s missing here are real songs. FUR songs.

Please read the rest of the article at www.inyourspeakers.com

Craw'z (03.16.2010)

FUR myspace

Loscil

Endless Falls (Kranky, 03.2010)

For: Stars of the Lid, Tim Hecker, William Basinski

Byline: Loscil's Endless Falls is to rainy spring days as Fennesz's Endless Summer is to summer sunsets.

Loscil may have given away too much by the rainstreaked windshield that adorns their newest release Endless Falls. Aside from the obvious mood of the album; quiet, building drones for quiet, rainy days; the rain obscuring the photographs object creates an effective metaphor for the buried, other-room effect of Loscils subdued output. After trading the perennial moodiness of the pacific northwest for the cut and dry seasons of the high country I have found myself really missing the rain and overcast skies of Seattle. Endless Falls was the perfect background music as I drove Addy around doing saturday errands during an all to uncommon rainy day. All to uncommon for these parts. It is not a stretch to say that this album was made for moments like these, Scott Morgan's drones border on the ethereal, muted tones of gray and green that blend together in some unmarked vanishing point. Rain, bookending the album, also serves as a perfect analogy for the overall effect of Morgan's music. Boomkat's excellent review of this album put it like this, "in the photograph a form of interference displaces the content of the picture as its true subject, and so it goes in Loscil's music. While Morgan's string sections and looping melodic gestures make up the fabric of these recordings it's the muffling and masking of them that draws the true beauty out of this music." Truth. Morgan's looped piano lines pulse up from the ether like sound filtering through a decibel ravaged eardrum. Percussion comes in surging orbs of shimmering electronics like the beats from a house-party next door, barely audible enough to make their presence felt but not enough to fully show their hand. Neo-classical washes of staticy synths and lilting violins overlay match the rhythmic lapping of gossamer electronic production. On the album's last track "The Making of Grief Point" Daniel Bejar from Destroyer (whom Morgan is the drummer for) shows up to deliver a spoken word piece. Loscil's Endless Falls is to rainy spring days as Fennesz's Endless Summer is to summer sunsets. Perfect addendums, immediately transportive masterpieces of time and place. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this ends up on my top 10 this year.

Ryan H.

Loscil Myspace

Danìel Bjarnason

Processions (Bedroom Communities, 03.2010)

For: Nico Muhly, Antonìn Dvoràk, Lawrence English

Byline: Sweeping orchestral arrangements that resist any post- or neo- tags define this incredible new addition to the Icelandic Bedroom Communities roster. Originally Published on www.inyourspeakers.com. Used By Permission from In Your Speakers, LLC

Placing your music in a conceptual and methodical framework that has enjoyed an uninterrupted discourse through the past six centuries shouldn’t seem experimental. Placing an album firmly rooted in classical symphonic ideas of the late 19th and early 20th century out in a market defined by blowing these compositions up and piecing them back together with little more than a sequencer, however, should be. This is the place in the trajectory of neo-classical music that Daníel Bjarnason’s Processions finds us. In a musical culture so determined to push our crucial musical influences under the bus of experimentalism and abandonment of form, a musician who adheres firmly the classics (Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak) would be and should be greeted as a true original, a wild innovator.

As the newest member on the Icelandic Bedroom Communities roster (there are four others: Ben Frost, Nico Muhly, Valgeir Sigurosson, and Sam Amidon) Bjarnason is in good company with artists who are grounded in classical music. Boasting two composers now, Muhly and Bjarnason, Sigurosson’s small imprint has a well founded reputation of putting out music that explores the edges of classical music while adhering with an academic rigidness to the practices of composition. Bjarnason, however, doesn’t seem interested in exploring the boundaries between classical music and experimental electronic like a majority of the Bedroom Communities artists. Bjarason writes music to fill concert halls, to score Lawrence of Arabia-like epics, yet fills a space that is intensely personal and emotionally transparent.

Read Full Review at www.inyourspeakers.com

Ryan H.

Daniel Bjarnason Bandcamp Page

Daníel Bjarnason - Bow to String (Live at Iceland Airwaves) from KEXP RADIO on Vimeo.

First Dog To Visit The Center Of The Earth

Colossus Archosaur (2010, Self-Released)

For: Black Dice, early-Stag Hare, MZ Mona Mars,

Byline: There is gold down there.

How exactly would a dog get to the center of the earth? I mean like, logistically? I want to know because I am currently working on a big-budget, ID4 meets 2012 meets Air Bud family blockbuster event of the summer screenplay based around a team of scientists who are led by a lovable, irreverent talking dog scientist determined to keep the earths core spinning after a haywire secret government conspiracy test prophesied by Mayans. I am going to call this The First Dog To Visit The Center Of The Earth. Sorry to rip off your moniker like this but there are millions to be made. Nah, I wouldn't do that to FDVCE, his subterranean-molten jams are too tight, too colossus to even think about anthropomorphizing. FDVCE's fractured beats, pitch-shifting, knob-twisting proclivities, odd-ball sound samples (basketballs on "Levitate Teepee Rotate?") and pure tonal expressionism anchored by a bizarre, albeit brilliant, internal logic defy any process to bring this into any sort of natural environment. Not that Colossus Archosaur is somehow inorganic or divorced from any human involvement, on the contrary, we simply don't have a word for this; it's not in our phraseology. Any attempt to plumb the depths FDVCE's hour-and-a-half voyage to the center of the earth would be pure crypto-zoology, an elusive quest led by pseudo-scientists (and pseudo-music critics) to reach some conclusion that "it exists! I've seen (heard) it!" You just have to believe me. The unsettling tonal shifts, keyed up synth lines, ping-ponging electronically manipulated beats keep the trajectory space-bound, while washes of noise, tribal beats, occasional glimpses of a gloriously messed with vocal samples keep the soil-gazing trajectory down to our home planet. FDVCE compositions crawl, then soar, then screech, then roar. Quite simply this is one of the best things I have heard all year.

Moral of the story, FDVCE totally kills it. If you read Crawf's brilliant post on Boy Fruit's album Repulsive, chances are you are totally going to dig this. Definately cut from the same cloth, Crawford put it best when he said, "Boy Fruit’s tendency to produce songs that feel more like singles might be the rowdy, party-crazy teenage little brother to FDVCE’s sprawling segues and conceptually artful nerdiness." Agreed. How cool is it that FDVCE is making all of this sickly sweet ear-candy available for frees on the web? Well, what are you waiting for? Download this! FDVCE and Boy Fruit, for putting out music that totally blows us away we are extending a formal invitation for a Denver-Salt Lake City Mini-Tour to shower us with some of your outer-space jamz? Lodging and breakfast are on the house. So are rad bands to play with. The offer is on the table.

Ryan H.

Download Colossus Archosaur here.

FDVCE Myspace

Aloha

Home Acres (Polyvinyl, 03.2010)

For: AM/FM, The Velvet Teen, Silver Apples

Byline:The geographically displaced prog-poppers delve deep into tempestuous topics and emerge with the heaviest and ultimately best album of their career. Originally published on www.inyourspeakers.com. Used by permission from In Your Speakers, LLC.

....After releasing 2006’s universally acclaimed prog-pop tour-de-force Some Echoes and their equally lauded, stripped-down acoustic EP Light Works, Aloha’s opening announcement of a bass drum pedal being hammered to the floor, and a driving bassline on “Building A Fire” sound downright explosive. This concentrated repackaging of Cale Park’s most propulsive moments lock the song into a focused canter of laser beam intensity. Guitars come in quick, staccato bursts; barely melodic but hardly atonal, breaking the minimalist percussion show just enough to make themselves felt, and then exiting as quickly as they entered. After an announcement this compelling, “Moonless March” begins to unpack the kinetic interplay between Lipple’s lisping vocals (buried under layers of distortion) and vibraphone arrangements, and Park’s virtuoso percussion. “Moonless March” has been a longstanding crowd favorite; Aloha has been kicking the song around since at least early 2007 and its belated appearance on a full-length album benefits from years of tinkering, making it the album’s immediate standout single. Barely changing tempo from “Building a Fire,” “Moonless March” is Parks at his most jaw-droppingly frantic while still sounding amazingly cohesive....

...Crawling out of the self-imposed Siberian exile is the sentiment on “Waterwheel,” a semi-mystic rumination on existence reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s short film Village of Watermills. Watermills, in that film, represent the concept of cyclic rebirth and the transitory nature of life. Lipple posits “two hands on the waterwheel/the cold creek runs through everyone from here.” I can dig that. While we may not have total control over the course of our lives, there are quite a few things that we can control, and while we may not immediately see the direct results of our actions, they do exist somewhere down the line. Moments like these make me glad I am listening to this album for the express purpose of revealing some of its mysteries to others. Even if the world ends (please let it end after March 9th so you can hear this) at least I got a glimpse of something really wonderful.

I wonder if Spring gets off on being withholding. It comes at a time when you are past looking forward to it; it comes when you are comfortably settled within the cool hues of gray winter skies. Home Acres, while decidedly overcast, still retains a lining of the group’s entry-level stabs at making sense of the universe. 2010 finds Aloha a little older and a little wiser, like your smart older brother saying, “look, I don’t have all the answers. I’m just as confused as you are.”

Read the full article here on www.inyourspeakers.com

Ryan H.

Aloha myspace

Boy Fruit

Repulsive (Cyber Dude, 2010)

For: Black Dice, Mouse On Mars, Coil

Byline: Noisy, funky, extraterrestrial beats: Boy Fruit lays 'em down, you do 'em up.

I’m smiling right now. Know why? I’m listening to a song called “Alien Swing” by Jason Harmon - a.k.a. Boy Fruit - and it’s one of the most demonically twisted, yet utterly funky beats I’ve come across in some time. Boy Fruit comes to us from Ohio of all places. Wait... is that right? Ohio? Do aliens hang out in Ohio? Do they have raves there? If they do, Boy Fruit might have an established residence as permanent DJ for whatever club they get down at up there in... Maumee. I don’t even want to think about what goes on at these throw-downs, especially given the grotesque (yet enticingly amazing) album art shown above, but I’m happy nonetheless bumping their jamz.

Repulsive is the newest installment of Boy Fruit tunes, one of four releases he’s now compiled, all of which you can snag off his website (linked below). I haven’t had a chance to peruse any older material yet, but Repulsive would be an impressive introduction to any artist, so this may not be a bad place to start. The album sounds pitch-bent slightly downward, resulting in a mix that feels like it’s been constructed on a soft foundation of quicksand. Oddball, whirl-a-gig noises funnel dizzyingly around your ears beneath smart, melodic hooks that tightrope walk along a wire of atonality. Synths operate here like vocals, but those of an extraterrestrial mournfully moaning away. It’s all caked together like mud atop dimensionally-shifting tunnels of drone and a trudging groove. Though the whole thing meshes well and seems fully formed, it still drips at its sides and feels unstable... remember that alien thing that killed Lieutenant Yar? This stuff kind of sounds like that guy looked. It’s also similarly slow-moving, dark and strangely sinister in tone.

The coolest thing about Boy Fruit is that though this is indeed weirdo noise experimentalism, somehow the project filters these sentiments through pop music mainstays and forms. “YOY” is a waltz, “Lump Dump” feels inspired by dub-house, and so on. Multiple listens work to unearth questions with few answers - an infinite puzzle that’ll never quite be solved but is impossible to resist from trying. It’s no surprise that this came to us here at the TOME literally within days of another release by an artist called First Dog to Visit the Center of the Earth. The two seem to be somewhat in cahoots with one another, as FDVCE appears to have posted a pic of a couple in bed together on Boy Fruit's MySpace page - the female is denoted as Boy Fruit, the male as FDVCE. Yikes. Expect a run down of FDVCE in the coming days, but for now, just take note that if you like one, you’ll probably love the other. The main differences I hear have to do with function: Boy Fruit’s tendency to produce songs that feel more like singles might be the rowdy, party-crazy teenage little brother to FDVCE’s sprawling segues and conceptually artful nerdiness.

Ohio, though... srsly. Who knew?

--Craw’z 3/9/2010

Free Download of Repulsive

Boy Fruit Official MySpace

Boy Fruit Official Website

p.s. Boy Fruit's MySpace page lists "Cyber Dude" as his record label. Hopefully it's not this Cyber Dude...

Aarktica

In Sea Remixes (Silber Records, 02.2010)

For: Stars of the Lid, German Shepherd, Yume Bitsu

Byline: One of 2009's best releases gets the remix treatment from loads of talented musicians. Drop everything and buy this.

Jon DeRosa's elegiac masterpiece of an ambient-drone record In Sea got me through a very busy semester of school last year. The weight of the music, DeRosa's amazing story, and the therapeutic nature it had on me as I sat up writing paper after paper led to an easy place on my best of 2009 list. Now, Silber Records is graciously releasing a glorious remix album no more than 3 months after its initial release. The remix album is a tricky feat to pull off. First, the source material has to be strong enough to retain its core attributes while withstanding radical tonal and textural changes.

A big check in that box.

Second, the contributers have to alter the original recording enough to warrant another listen to a song you have spun through over a dozen times.

Put another check there.

Those said changes have to alter the song enough to make you look at it in another light, recognizing things that you missed and opening the song to limitless possibilities.

Three for three.

Fourth, make sure Prefuse-73 is on there.

Oh man, so close.

While Scott Herren may be absent, Aarktica's talented friends more than make up for this. Remixes include contributions from Al Qaeda (fellow non-SLC moondial tape contributers) who take "A Plague of Frosts" and underscore it with post-industrial percussion and haunting field-recordings in the vein of Odd Nosdam's eerie "Burner" off Level Live Wires. My favorite remixes are by Planar and Keith Canisuis who take previous wordless songs and sing over them, totally owning the song and changing its very meaning. I have an unhealthy obsession with the Keith Canisuis remix of "Autumnal", I love his decidedly 80's take on the song, transforming the subtle guitar lines into cheesy 80's synth lines and gorgeously-weird keyed up vocals. I don't know very much about this Dutch artist, but I expect to be delving into his back catalogue very soon. Other contributers include but are not limited to: Aidan Baker-collaborator-ThisQuietArmy, the skittering electronic percussion of yellow6, Mason Jones, the pastoral field recordings of Summer Cats. TOME favs Remora, Declining Winter, James Duncan, Ramses III, etc... Not to be missed.

Ryan H.

Silber Records Page

Myspace Page

Past Lives

Tapestry of Webs (Suicide Squeeze, 02.2010)

For: XTC, Liars, Unwound

Byline: Is there life after fronting the Blood Brothers? Jordan Blilie leads 3/4 of The Brothers Blood into the studio and emerges with this churning, grating, downright fantastic record. Originally published on www.inyourspeakers.com. Used by permission by In Your Speakers, LLC.

....Tapestry of Webs is a discordant, grating, gem of a record, one that borrows heavily from Blood Brothers influential mainstay, the turbulent noise rock of the nineties but filtered through the gloriously weird excesses of eighties post-punk. Being free of Johnny Whitney’s shocking counter-points to Jordan Blilie’s commanding croon, the songs are largely constructed around Blilie’s surprisingly strong songwriting and penchant for memorable hooks over a tumultuous sea of swirling guitar attacks and a newly minted horn section. Past Lives benefits greatly from the return of guitarist Devin Welch and the move of Morgan Henderson from bass to baritone guitar. Henderson slathers his deep, rhythmic grooves across each song with an impenetrable swirling drone of cicada-like buzzing. The rhythm section, still helmed by Gajadhar, is augmented by a punch-drunk horn section that gallops along with his start-stop playing.

Past Lives are in their element at their most experimental. “K-Hole” borrows heavily from the churning, chaotic soundscapes of this years Clipd Beaks album, or last year’s HEALTH. Heavy rhythmic breakdowns over clashing guitars are pinned to Blilie’s feathered cap as he propels the song along with a buoyant vocal cadence before breaking into a teeth-curling shriek on the chorus, like the Blood Brothers never broke up. The albums first single, “Hex Takes Hold” is a triumphant hurtle into XTC-meets-"Drums"-era-Liars, taking on a throat-grabbing chorus of backfired prophetic visions and pin-sticking voodoo apparitions. 60’s power-pop holds court in the surprisingly catchy “”Don’t Let the Ashes Fill Your Eyes” down to the Shangri-La-like “oooh-la-la-las.” “Paralyzer” is a kiss-off as much as it is a open-mouthed tongue-in-cheek ode to the 80’s power ballads that make mystical the mere appearance of a woman as a paralyzing sexual Medusa (think “Jessie’s Girl” or “Cherry Pie”). Replace the schlocky guitar theatrics with some serious down-tuned guitar rumblings and Tapestry of Webs is officially not The Blood Brothers 6th studio album.

Ryan H.

Read the full review here

Past Lives Myspace

Son Lux

Weapons EP (anticon, 02.2010)

For: Ekkehard Ehlers + Odd Nosdam, Matmos

Byline: Son Lux's combination of weaving classical harmonies around put-your-hands-in-the-ayer hip-hop beats are given the remix treatment by the best in the game: instrumental hip-hop artist/producer Alias, neo-classical composer Nico Muhly.

An album for all occasions, Son Lux took an already well-written song and for his EP, remixed and reorchestrated each song, collaborating with various artists transcending genres. The result: each song on the album, though the same song lyrically, holds itself independent from one another, with a singular, haunting melody keeping each song connected. I will be the first to say, that, personally, remixes are not my cup of tea, but Son Lux's uses of different beats and instruments and making each song unique, definitely won me over.

No matter the mood or occasion I can revert back to this album. If I am mellowed out I can listen to the WEAPONS II or WEAPONS VII. Son Lux's classical use of string instruments in the first song, won my heart and imagination over. WEAPONS III (Polyphonic Remix) immediately reminded me of Matmos, in which the artists creatively utilize the sounds and beats around them to build an entire song. The Polyphonic Remix definitely achieved this goal.

The rumors are true. I am a sucker for hip-hop, hence the paper chain I have made to count down T.I.'s release date from prison (March 26!!!). So when I began listening to the Alias Remix of WEAPONS VI, I was completely captivated, and found myself nodding my head to the beat and waving my hands in the air like I just don't care. Beyond the incorporated use of hip-hop, I am pretty much a sap for classical string instruments and the majority of his songs incorporated such a use, which left my ears yearning for more. If anything, this album definitely left me wanting more Son Lux. My solution? Leaving it on repeat. Best. Idea. Ever.

.erin.leigh.

Son Lux Myspace

Slow Six

Tomorrow Becomes You (Western Vinyl, 02.2010)

For: Dirty Three, Daniel Bjnarsson, Sonna

Byline: Western Vinyl tops itself again and releases hands-down the best neo-classical/post-rock album of the past couple years.

Wayne Coyne infamously said, "I play the recording studio" when asked what about his contributions beyond fronting the Flaming Lips. In many ways composer/musical think-tank Christopher Tignor could claim the same thing, but add, "I play the computer". On a first, second, or third listen of Slow Six's third full length Tomorrow Becomes you it is unapparent how much electronic manipulation went into forming the robust neo-classical/post-rock long player. I was totally unaware until I read a pretty amazing interview with Tignor on Textura. What sounds like a pretty straightforward set up: two violins, a guitar, drums, and a Rhodes piano, with minimal electronic percussion; is in fact, put through way more manipulation than a casual listen reveals. Tignor is the author of two (possibly more) recording software devices that drastically change the pitch and hue of acoustic instruments being run as an input through this software. To wit:

"Orbits is a Java application I built for a laptop quintet of mine with the same name. It basically let's you use a Wacom tablet or your mouse to draw around the screen and create a stream of colored dots, each one representing a sample taken on the fly of whatever sound you feed into your computer. In the second half of “Sympathetic Response System” I fed the guitar, Rhodes, and Theo's ambient percussion into it. The direction and speed you draw changes whether these samples play forward, backward, and at what speed, and you can have hundreds of these little sample dots swirling about the screen at once if desired. The goal is to try and subtly bend our perception of the recognizable instrumental landscape by hearing the abstractions side by side with their sources." (from the Textura interview)

Is there an app for that? Cool right? Even with having an inside peek into how this album was created in no ways diminishes the purely emotional impact it had me, the first-tenth time listening to it. Simply put, there is no better band working in this medium right now. Western Vinyl released Balmorhrea's Constellations earlier this year, that while serving as a good reference point (and amazing in its own right), is of a totally different breed than the soaring violin lines, proggy time signatures and post-rock ascendancy caught in the laser-beam singular vision of Tignor. The way the looped violin parts weave around each other creates an unworldly beauty in the gorgeous segues between the more straight forward post-rock tinged songs and the tension filled rhythm-less tracks. While admittedly not a folk artist, "Because Together We Resonate" features an amazing amplified cello bridge that could stand in as a ruddy, colonial jig or an Appalachian Baroque piece. "The Night You Left New York" starts with twin violin lines both plucked and bowed, while the Rhodes plucks chords in a random almost aleatoric nature, this is sets the mood before the drums and guitar kick in to announce the decidedly back-to-basics rock approach Slow Six has introduced on their newest album. This isn't the crescendo-core of Explosions in the Sky or Mogwai, nor is this the apocolyptic melancholy of Godspeed! This is classical music for the new millennium, pattern recognition played back on itself until the abstract disappears into form.

Western Vinyl, can we thank you enough for churning nothing but highly consistent, downright amazing albums these past two years? 2010 has already started off so well. We want to issue a formal thank you.

Ryan H.