...attempts to highlight the sorts of places that have been overrun and are derelict through lack of use; so the balloon stretching and edgy shuffling percussion describes landscapes seen through dusty windows and windswept abandoned courtyards...
album review
2660 posts
Basically, Wolves In The Throne Room are SO back, in what’s been a fantastic year for metal. Long may they continue dethroning the tyrants.
There's a feeling that Angine De Poitrine have pricked a lot of ears towards non-12TET music and also a sense that there's a whole massive shitload of people who've gone a lot deeper than AdP. Enter Phillip Golub stage left then.
There’s a special place in my heart for this release, there really is – continuing to pull greatness from the most unlikely of places, daring to roughening up that Bossanova perfection.
...the sense of space spread across five tracks being tempered by the addition of vocals. It still has that feeling of insulation from the everyday, as if this were a musical overcoat that could protect you from the ravages that the world has to offer.
...for a sound that could easily drift away, it is instead steadily driven, but with a subtlety that would not be the case with standard drumming. With ten tracks, half written by Zela and half by Jeremy, they open up a world that is in places diffuse yet sultry and in others unfamiliar and surprising.
What is this? Big synths, oodles of vocal production, a distinct sense of being pop. Pop + nausea. Hints that '90s r'n'b and The Human League have been banged through a blender.
The blossoming abstraction unwinds as La Lucha Es Un Poema Colectivo opens with crossed electric wires and percussive false starts, engaging and disjoining and emitting hollow echoes. A mystery voice intones as the instruments stretch and elaborate, dissolving into playground mayhem.
...when the quartet convened at the Southampton Arts Center in New York state they had never actually all played together. Although a bit of a baptism of fire, Martin felt a connection with the others that thankfully for us and for the sound crew was captured for posterity. Eight years later, clearing out an old computer, the files were rediscovered and the end result is here.
Whilst it’s not worth losing sleep over, the tags of shoegaze, dream-pop, indie-rock and indie-pop have somewhat lost consistent meaning over time and through differing geographical points of reference. At a more fundamental level though, the commonality across such elastically bordered genres is the eternal push and pull of melody and dissonance.
The thirteen tracks collected here contain diverse vocal stylings that are put through a whole raft of effects while surrounded by synth drones, strange waverings and head on-beats that are oddly manic and disorientating.
The stately melancholic nature of the pieces is well captured by the duo; but where they bring their own stamp is in the way they draw what is essentially indoor music evoking gowned ladies and bewigged gents moving in graceful arcs out into the open, lending it an air of dust and yearning...
Collecting…connecting... cultivating... the band’s antenna always seemed to be searching out ways to bend modernity back on itself, prey to an older consciousness. As such, Gold Is The Metal has got me re-playing, dot-joining its many components to so much of Coil’s discography, seeing where the contents have leaked into future use beyond the obvious connections of this track being the demo of that.
For me there is something in the melodic approach, the ringing guitars and personal lyrics that reminds me of the halcyon days of nineties guitar bands but with a modern twist, and with the addition of fiddle from Sophia Bartlett and banjo from Michael Rea pushing things in a slightly more countrified direction.
So when An Undying Love For A Burning World dropped, it was an incredible surprise, but one that gave rise to the usual uncertainty of a band returning from hiatus -- what it they’re shit now? Fortunately, they aren’t. As
...they use the mellow side of jazz as a starting off point, but happily mix it with classical, pop and a more progressive leanings to lead the listener gently down unexpected side streets.
Over sixteen tracks and a little under an hour, their insistent distorted guitars and brutal, thuggish drums revel in a sort of set construction that feels as though they are squeezing too much sound into too small a space that the guitars and drums seem to take it in turns to add a brick or slide in a block and watch the edifice gradually grow.
...there’s the summery wonderosa of the title track "Autosmile" that’s got to be one of the best sonic uplifts / natural evolves I’ve taken in all year. Honestly, this collection of songs taps into something special, showing the acoustic guitar / singer songwriter schtick has more to offer than certain stadium-fillers would have you believe.