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.

Adelyn's Pick of the Month: Balmorhea

Constellations (Western Vinyl, 02.2010)

For: Rachel's, Chaz Prymek, Hauschka

Byline: Absolutely gorgeous post-rock/neo-classical that stands in line with some of the greats in the genre.

The banjo isn’t exactly the most comely of instruments, but under the hands of Balmorhea, that thing could be a viola for all I’m concerned. It’s guttural twang is counter pointed by a gorgeous upswell of strings or a mournful guitar line. The marriage of discreet folk with the aesthetic austerity of post-classical compositions isn’t anything new, especially as Western Vinyl keeps churning out hit after hit (Sleep Whale, Slow Six), but what Balmorhea nails is the execution. There are string sections so brilliantly placed, pauses so pronounced that I could live a lifetime or more inside any moment of this album. Balmorhea seems to be operating on a next level type of songwriting (like the Die Antwoord next level) that sets Constellations heads and shoulders above any other release in this genre this year and last. In fact this could be the best release in this vein since Rachel’s The Sea and the Bells. Not simply an expressionistic deconstruction coupled around a few known chords, Balmorhea’s classical roots underpin the entire album. Beneath the delicately picked banjoes, strummed acoustic guitars and sampled vocal choirs, Erik Satie’s minimalist chord bursts and Joseph Haydn’s stringed fugues hold commanding sway. Constellations could live entirely outside of its conventions and influences as a purely evocative album, perfect for contemplative things that contemplative people do. Like walking, or driving, or the concept of Autumn. But deep inside we see the broadest swatches of Thee Silver Mt. Zion (or whatever they are calling themselves these days) brooding post-rock meets classical music, Max Richter's perfect musicianship and a whole slew of dead classical composers I could mention. Plus, there is a full-throated church organ that absolutely destroys me every time on “On the Weight of the Night”. Constellation’s accessible melding of classical and contemporary musical ideas is absolutely essential 2010 listening. In fact, if the world ends in 2012 this may be the album I put on to watch it all burn down.

Ryan H.

Balmorhea's incredible website

Ola Podrida

Belly of the Lion (Western Vinyl, 11.09)

For: Damien Jurado, Bowerbirds, Woods

Byline: Cinematic tales filled cautious optomisim and nostalgia from renowned film composer David Wingo.

It is no wonder David Wingo writes his songs like a director staging a carefully composed shot. After composing scores for David Gordon Green and recently Jared Hess, Wingo under his Ola Podrida moniker has released a quiet stunner of an album, his sophomore Belly of the Lion. For all intents and purposes, Wingo is not an expressionist, his stories and characters are shot on location, in abandoned bathroom stalls, your dads basement, and backyard pools. Picking up on themes of childhood memories and cautious optimism, Wingo weaves his memories and real world spatiality to compose delicately crafted tales rife with cinematic lushness and detail.

Not straying far from accomplished songwriters Damien Jurado and Jim White, Wingo wraps his mes-en-scenes around conservative amounts of acoustic guitars and banjoes that occasionally reach a crescendo and sometimes canter confidently through a track worth of memory tapes. When the expected emotional payoff-cum-ramshackle chorus hits, it isn't dripping with the contrived emotion of a barely taped-together run away train of wide-eyed catharsis. Wingo allows his tight instrumentation and woozy shoegaze major chord riffage (displayed in "Monday Morning") to speak for his warbled, already strained voice. Such a move makes an already dangerously emotionally charged album palatable and even makes the emotion palpable.

This isn't to say Wingo can't speak with tongues-o'-fire. His missionary like zeal in "Donkey" comes very close to "King of Carrot Flowers Pt. II" territory. Most of the album, however, takes a more subdued tone. The nostalgia of "Your Father's Basement" recalls with equal fondess making prank calls, looking for your dads stash of nudie (huh, there is no way to spell that) magazines and booze, to listening to rap to impress your friends hot older sisters. "Lakes of Wine" and "This Old World" are a montage of possible memories or imagined possibilities of skinny dipping, kidnapping, and mysterious notes found by a roadside.

Recorded (mostly) by himself in his apartment, Belly of the Whale, is an inviting, intimate step into the world of Ola Podrida which is a lot like a David Gordon Green film. A recognizable place and time with just enough poetic incongruities to make the recognizable seem a little bit mysterious and eerie, but nevertheless real.

Ryan H.

This Old World - OLA PODRIDA from Zellner Bros. on Vimeo.

Sleep Whale

Houseboat (11.09, Western Vinyl)

For: Here We Go Magic, Years, Rachel's

Byline: A textured and powerfully moving record that skillfully balances the band's bifurcated pop and ambient sensibilities. Originally published on www.inyourspeakers.com. Used by permission from In Your Speakers, LLC.

In indie rock nomenclature, “Whale” has become the new “Wolf”, which had become the new “Black”, which in turn had become the new “Death”. In 2009 we have already seen releases by Freelance Whales, Or, the Whale, Noah and the Whale, Forget the Whale, and, lest we forget, The Devil Whale and White Whale. It looks like we have another onomastic epidemic on our hands, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the seventies, when everyone was naming their bands after geographical locations. With that said, you’d have to expect that at least one of these groups can live up to their favorite mammals’ mysterious, slow drift through the vast expanse of the oceans. If there is one “Whale” group that can do this it is Sleep Whale with their 2009 release, Houseboat.

FACT: Whales don’t ever really sleep. Because they are conscious breathers (they can’t take breaths while unconscious, unlike most other mammals) they can’t ever snooze like we can. The brains of whales are thought to compensate for this by shutting down one hemisphere at a time to get the rest they need piecemeal, so part of the day a whale is swimming through a hazy, half-awake/half-asleep existence. This is an apt metaphor for the sound Sleep Whale are going for. It is beautiful when a band’s name and the imagery evoked by it coincide as if by some benevolent cosmic force.

Hailing from Denton, TX, the collective known as Sleep Whale craft beautifully arranged songs from a rotating ensemble of acoustic guitars, violins, cellos, occasional woodwinds, a plethora of other assorted instruments, and sampled electronic programming. Of the thirteen gorgeous tracks on Houseboat, only a conservative handful feature vocals, and when they are present they are kept low in the mix, sounding like far-off whale song. The songs are structured around a few repeated instrumental lines, letting the occasional players of the extended Sleep Whale family fill in the cracks with delicious flourishes. A move that is positively irresistible is the occasional use of electronically manipulated vocal sampling, à la The Kallikak Family, featured extensively on “Light Tunnel”. The keyed up female vocal sample that follows the lilting violin line and mournful martial drumming is a place I want to live my life in.

The first single off of Houseboat, “Cotton Curls”, is a fairly good indicator of where this band could go if they didn’t let their ambient and chamber pop leanings overwhelm their penchant for middle-of-the-road indie rock songs. Fortunately for us, they lean much more heavily towards the former. A similar band in the ambient/pop balancing act that has put out an amazing and criminally overlooked album is Sleep Whales’ Western Vinyl labelmates Here We Go Magic. The formula that makes these bands so viable in both spheres is not the obligatory pop song/ambient song album structure but the actual tension going on beneath the surface of each song. Each pop song sounds like it was built from the ground up, piling an indie rock verse/chorus song structure atop a swirling, nebulous cloud of intricate instrumentation and electronic manipulation. The ambient songs are held together by a compositional fidelity to deliberate pacing and mood, with each song having a clear arc and peak.

Perhaps there is no better evidence of structuring than the album’s most gorgeous instrumental track, “Roof Sailing” (an apt name for houseboat living), a simple looped acoustic guitar line with a bowed violin laid over the top and processed harmonica or harmonium, with some neat sounding synth washes and hiccuping electronics. These increase on a linear scale in both intensity and frequency until they reach a boiling point that marks the introduction of an underwater drum kit pounded with the ferocity of a killer whale. It has occurred to me while listening to Houseboat just how similar this album sounds to another evocative masterpiece, Appleseed Cast’s Low Level Owl. Both records are recorded similarly, with atmospherics far outweighing innate pop sensibilities. The shoo-in example for this comparison is “Still Drumming”, with its Sung Tongs era atonal acoustic guitars and underwater vocals, and climatic revelry of drums.

These nomenclature trends come in cycles, as we have already seen with “Crystal” and “Antlers” running their courses (culminating, and dying, in the obvious move of combining the two), but we will forever have The Antlers and Crystal Castles as postmarks on the twisting road of band naming. Sleep Whale will forever be the crème de la crème of the “Whales”. That is, until my band, Death Whale destroys them all.

Ryan H.

Sleep Whale Myspace

Here We Go Magic

Here We Go Magic (2009, Western Vinyl)

Byline: Ambient vs. Pop: Fiiiite!

For: Women, Gang Gang Dance, Deerhunter

One of my favorite and most-listened to albums of the year so far is also the hardest to pin down and describe. I’m not sure if this is due more to the fact that Here We Go Magic’s self-titled debut is all over the place stylistically, or if I’m just not as clever as I originally thought. Regardless... at the round length of nine-tracks, this record is easily divisible into thirds: three are completely ambient, three fall into more of a “song”-song category, and the remaining third finds a sort of middle-ground between the two extremes. This isn’t to say that “ambience” and “pop” are mutually exclusive animals. Indeed, Here We Go Magic make a convincing case that these approaches ultimately need each other, especially by today’s progressive-music standards - and it’s these ambient-pop combos that really give the group’s debut outing an edge. One standout is “I Just Want to See You Underwater,” which emerges quietly and gracefully from a murky depth with soft, pulsating drums and a vamped two-chord progression that swells and swirls around a pair of haunting, submerged vocals. At his best, Here We Go Magic mastermind Luke Temple really understands the importance of creating a musical mood and place, and thus transports the listener there - trapping them within his soft and colorful landscapes.

But the album’s widely diverse sound (being firstly, the record’s initial pull and strength) is also the one and only source of frustration. These 9 tracks are aching to fit together more cohesively. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the ambient noise songs, like with “Ghost List,” which folds static, fuzz, and feedback into warm blankets of sound you can really wrap yourself into. They’re never long enough to really get boring, so it’s tough to complain. Still, their placement within the context of the record as a whole feels odd. It’s like a puzzle where the nooks and crannies are chiseled and well defined, but don’t quite slide in just the way they should.

Whatever pitfalls this will cause with listeners, however, are sure to be reconciled by the outstanding nature of the album’s individual works. “Fangela” is a wonderfully bouncy track that feels like a sort of inter-stellar cowboy tune. It’s also creepy and inviting: who, or what, is Fangela? My guess is a seductive vampiress, which really jives with the enticing pull of the the song’s infectious melody and chord progression. Meanwhile, the closer “Everything’s Big,” which at first feels wildly out of place with it’s waltzy feel and Schmilsson-style vocals, reveals itself over time as the album’s biggest grower, and ultimately most rewarding song. As a whole, the album definitely stands as one of the year’s most exciting debuts and reveals a band that I really hope doesn’t get lost in the folds. But given their recent busy tour schedule, which included loads of dates with the likes of Grizzly Bear and Walkmen, it’s not clear that’s a very real threat, at least any time soon.

--Craw(NTL) 8/12/09

Here We Go Magic Official Website