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After two excellent recent split releases, the duo of Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner have put out a full length CD that manages to spread out over an hour and still retain the variety of moody and complex sounds that they did so well in previous shorter bursts.
Between those two splits, Mamiffer did both denser heavy rock-influenced sounds as well as more pensive, piano driven ambient works, both of which receive good representation here.Above all, there’s an over-reaching sense of bombast and drama that, while tinged with prog-rock tendencies, never falls into any of the pretentious pitfalls that usually mar such works and instead have a regal flair most strive for, but few attain.
"As Freedom Rings" opens slowly, with a soft panned organ that picks up additional tones and sounds with each pass, bringing in electronic textures and washes of white noise.Like many of the pieces on here, Coloccia's piano playing eventually becomes the focus, flanked by synth layers, Turner's restrained guitar feedback, and hollow percussion.Layers come and go, eventually building to a dramatic crescendo that is punctuated with quiet, layered vocals; choral and chanted, that close the track powerfully.
The long, ambient "We Speak In The Dark" stretches out for over 20 minutes, beginning with expansive, drawn out notes of unclear origin that become more grounded when the piano arrives, a punchier contrast to the frozen tones off in the distance.It has a comparatively slower, more deliberate pace than before, but with more grandiose outbursts, including full string arrangements courtesy of Eyvind Kang, who also did such work with Sunn O)))'s recent Monoliths & Dimensions album.The chaotic, speaking in tongue vocals that are male and female, screamed, growled, and chanted add a frightening, inhuman like quality to a cinematic piece.
Piano and drums also characterize the final two pieces, both of which also include strings and guitar, but each go into drastically different territories."Eating Our Bodies" emphasizes the guitar a bit more, putting on a heavier, more tense sound that eventually closes in slow, dark and pounding territory.Conversely, "Iron Water" is more concise, first as a carefully measured piano and guitar duet that is simply beautiful before unraveling, leaving echoed vocals, ambience, and shimmering guitar noise in its wake.Even with the long subsonic rumbles that close the album, it has an overall lighter quality to it.
Like the split LPs I've reviewed recently, Mare Decendrii doesn’t fit into any specific genre, nor can it be easily explained or described, it simply is what it is.While the two on the surface sound nothing alike, there is a certain shared vibe with Earth’s more recent work.Both have a similar, cinematic feeling that conjures up a lot of feelings and images that strengthen the work.However, Mamiffer’s use of piano, strings, and more abstract electronic textures are what sets them apart, helping them carve out their niche.
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Following 1983's Soul Possession, Annie moved into a shed in Adrian Sherwood’s garden and slowly began assembling an album's worth of new material with his then-wife, Kishi Yamamoto.  The new songs were very different than her previous work: the scary and disturbed-sounding elements completely disappeared and Annie began to make a conscious attempt to assimilate pre-rock influences like Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf into her work.  The actual impact of those divas on her sound was still fairly slight at this point (1987) though, as Jackamo turned out to be a very weird, difficult, and transitional album.
This wasn't the first time that Kishi and Annie had worked together: Kishi had actually played a bit of synth and Chinese harp on Soul Possession and was probably responsible for some of its more outré textures, as she was an enthusiastic proponent of avant-garde classical and musique concrète.  Also returning to the fold were Dub Syndicate/African Head Charge percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah and –of course– master dub producer Adrian Sherwood.  The only major line-up change, in fact, was the departure of Crass and the arrival of stellar bassist Doug Wimbish (who later wound up joining Living Colour).  The presence of Wimbish made a huge difference, as he ensured that these songs had a fat, ribcage-rattling bottom end.
Oddly, despite the eclecticism of Annie and Kishi's inspirations, Jackamo is still very much a dub album (albeit an aberrant one).  With the very notable exception of an accordion-led cover of Charles Aznavour's "Hier Encore," the bulk of this album maintains a lumbering, slow-motion reggae feel buffeted by Sherwood's studio-tweaked electronics and Noah's omnipresent clattering hand-percussion.  "Hier Encore" was a very clear harbinger of what was eventually to come in the future, as it later reappeared in different form as "Yesterday When I was Young" on When Good Things Happen to Bad Pianos, but Annie's transformation into a singularly charming and urbane chanteuse was still nearly a decade away at this point.  For the rest of Jackamo, her vocals are still pretty tough and post-punky.  Sometimes that works beautifully, like in the blackly funny dance anti-anthem "Bastinado," but there are some serious misfires too.  I found the very hammy and shout-y "Jack Yo Mama" in particular to be almost unlistenable.  The very '80s metal guitar in "Rise" (and again on "Rise (dub)") also made for a somewhat rocky listening experience.  It would be another few years before Annie completely mastered balancing power with restraint and nuance.
Jackamo is my least favorite of Annie's early albums but it is important in the context of her evolution, as it provided a bridge between the superior but very different albums that bookended it (Soul Possession and Short and Sweet).  Also, it marked the first time when Annie's tenderness and wit started to conspicuously manifest themselves in her music.  She definitely took some wild chances too, like the prominent jungle noises in "Chasing the Dragon Down Broadway" and "Jackamo."  There is certainly no shortage of personality, attitude, imagination, or daring here, it's just that Annie hadn't quite fully come into her own yet as a songwriter (though the title piece, "Bastinado" and "As I Lie in Your Arms" are all quite good).  Jackamo offers some surprises and great moments, but not quite enough to make it a great album.
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This is the final part of a collaborative trilogy that Henrik Nordvargr Björkk and Masami Akita began back in 2004 and it reaffirms my long-standing belief that Merzbow is almost always more compelling when he is working with other people.  While the two artists divided up creating the raw material for the album, the end result certainly sounds like the duo shared a common vision.  For the most part, the blend of brooding synth drones, subtle pulsing, and Merz-blasts of white noise and dissonant feedback works beautifully, but Henrik and Masami admittedly lose a bit of steam over the album's second half when they ill-advisedly flog a single simple motif for almost half an hour.  Up until that point, however, Partikel III is a quite stellar effort.
Lamentably, I have not heard the previous two installments of Partikel, but my tentative hypothesis is that having Masami Akita be the one who starts a piece is generally not a good idea.  Intuitively, it seems like it would be a lot easier to ravage and mutilate something already musical than to try to belatedly turn gnarled chaos into something resembling music and Partikel III seems to fully bear me out on that: the first two pieces (composed by Björkk) are uniformly great, while final two pieces (composed are Akita) are considerably less so, despite there being no noticeable drop in the quality of Merzbow's efforts.
"Heterotic String Hybrid" opens with a surprisingly propulsive techno-inspired beat amidst a sea of subdued white noise before gradually calming down into a nice bit of buzzing, hissing, and brooding ambiance buffeted by woodpecker-like machine noises.  Notably, the duo avoid all of the perils that normally befall dark ambient music, refraining entirely from murky, empty drones; bombast; or a cartoonish degree of gloominess.  Rather, the piece maintains a nicely simmering intensity, as Akita never fully opens up, opting instead for hollow, creepily futuristic beeps and patiently rationed washes of static. Eventually, the beat briefly returns before the piece ends abruptly around the 8-minute mark, making it quite possibly the first time that I have ever wished a Merzbow song had gone on longer.  That is not to say that I do not sometimes love Merzbow, but I usually think more along the lines of "woah" or "i think my ears are bleeding" than "gosh, Akita should have really allowed himself more time to develop that theme."
"Lorentz Covariance" is similarly wonderful, offering up a deep, restrained pulse, stuttering sub-bass, and more inhuman, sci-fi electronic chaos.  Akita gets a bit more violent on this piece, eventually unleashing a torrent of squiggling, howling noise, but it feels well-earned when the eruption finally comes, as it was elegantly preceded by a slow and somewhat strangled build-up.  Also, even the expected firestorm offers quite a bit of (comparative) nuance, as quite a bit of chirping and throbbing almost-music bursts through the surrounding squall (there's even a looped, blown-out beat at one point).  While it is definitely still "noise," it nonetheless manages to feel like it is not far removed from an especially crazy space-rock crescendo instead. Also, I was again sorry to see the piece end, even after another healthily long 8-minute duration.
Unfortunately, all that delightful momentum and wanting of more dissipates rapidly once the duo launch into the album's ostensible centerpiece, the two-part "Submaton Color."  The problem is quite simple to identify, as it stretches on for over half an hour and is built upon a relentless, unchanging synth bass line that sounds like it was plucked from some aggressive '90s industrial dancefloor hit.  Akita gamely tries to keep things interesting by working with mostly dissonant, clashing feedback tones rather than harsh noise, but the thick, throbbing synth hook is just too distracting for it to quite work.
It is actually quite a perverse inversion, as the underlying song is far more forceful than Akita's electronics, yet it is too maddeningly heavy-handed and one-dimensional to enjoy at all.  I fleetingly thought that the piece might be dramatically better if all of Björkk's music was removed (it literally sounds like he just hit "play" on a loop and wandered away), but the Merzbow component is probably far too sparse and slow-building to work on its own.  Gradually, Akita's noise snowballs enough to eclipse the music and things get better, but not nearly enough to justify the wildly indulgent duration and slow build-up.
Despite ending with such a prolonged miscalculation, I was actually quite impressed with this release, as its high points rank among some of the best work that I have heard from Akita.  Also, Partikel III can easily be made into a near-perfect album by simply skipping the 14-minute "Submaton Color, Pt. 1," as the superior second part opens with the synthesizer getting completely eclipsed by the noise storm (or just fading out altogether).  While that basically leaves only a very good Merzbow piece rather than a very good Merzbow and Nordvargr piece (aside from perhaps the cool machine-like throb at the end), the rest of the album otherwise feels like much more than the sum of its parts.  I will definitely be going back to investigate the previous two Partikel installments.
 
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One of my favorite reissues of 2012 was Porter Ricks' Biokinetics, a maddeningly hard-to-get dub techno classic from Chain Reaction's golden age.  Unbeknownst to me, that album was apparently just the beginning of a larger project, as Type is back with yet another landmark reissue from Basic Channel's influential imprint.  While Vibrant Forms is not quite as distinctive or intermittently amazing as Biokinetics, it compensates by being consistently excellent from start to finish.
Fluxion is one of the guises of Greek producer Konstantinos Soublis, who is still fairly active on Denmark's Echocord label.  This particular compilation, however, is a collection of some of his earliest work, though not a very comprehensive one.  In fact, it only includes Fluxion's debut single (1998's Lark/Atlos) and 1999's Largo EP, though both the 1999 original and this reissue toss in a couple of short bonus tracks as well ("Lapses" and "Cyclops Machine").
Some of Fluxion's other releases from the same period are actually compiled on a second volume of Vibrant Forms, but that one remains woefully out-of-print and expensive for the time being (Chain Reaction's signature metal boxes being both collectible and amusingly prone to damaging their contents).  I certainly hope to be able to hear the rest of those songs someday to get a more complete picture of Soublis' early creative flurry, but it is easy to see why Type was so thrilled to put out this first volume by itself (they hail it as a "legendary masterpiece").  Certainly, more Fluxion would be nice, but this volume beautifully embodies the electronic music zeitgeist of the era just fine by itself: this is as archetypal as dub techno can possibly be.
Of course, the line separating "archetypal" and "faceless" is quite a blurry one, which is perhaps why Soublis' name is not as well-known as it probably should be.  Vibrant Forms is simply the sound of someone who understood dub techno on a deep and intuitive level and set about putting all of its requisite components together in exactly the right way at exactly the right time.  As a result, nearly all of these ten songs adhere to the same template: a steady 4/4 kick-drum thump, a hazy/echo-ey synth motif, a simple bass line, and constant subtle additions and subtractions to the beat.  The overall effect is like a highly precise machine creating a mesmerizing, complex rhythm that never stops evolving, but the more mechanized/inhuman aspect of Fluxion is somewhat balanced out by the woozily warm and blurry synth chords (though that endlessly repeats as well).
Normally, such incredible similarity between pieces would make for a punishingly redundant and tedious album or at least prevent me from have much of a preference for any particular song, but I do not have that problem at all with Vibrant Forms.  The reason for that is that I would be perfectly happy if any one of these songs went on for the duration of the entire album, as all of beauty lies within the details and constant small changes: shifts in cymbal patterns, pops and hisses, slight variations in the sound of the synth, etc.  While the bass drum thump rarely (if ever) changes, the overall pulse never stops changing.  Given that, the best songs often tend to be the ones that go on the longest, though my favorites (the almost indistinguishable "Largo" and "Hiatus") only clock in at around 7- or 8-minutes.  Conversely, the album's weakest songs are simply those that end too soon, like the otherwise excellent 2-minute "Lapses."
Since Konstantinosis not actually a machine, he does occasionally stray a bit from his formula from time to time.  In fact, unexpected detours start to become the norm as the album gets closer and closer to the end.  One of the more divergent examples is "Pendoulous," which incorporates a prominent bassline and replaces the standard-issue chord stabs with rippling, murky dissonance.  An even more dramatic aberration is "Influx," which completely eschews a beat in favor of surprisingly harsh and sizzle-heavy synth washes.  My favorite of Fluxion's variations, however, is the closing "Opaque," which creates a hypnotic push-pull pulse with something that sounds like treated machine-noise.
The word "masterpiece" is woefully misused and I probably would not have declared Vibrant Forms to be one just a few short years ago, but I have recently expanded my definition of brilliance to include peerless craftsmanship rather than just bold vision.  Given that, this album is at the very least a legitimate, unqualified masterpiece of its genre, as it could not possibly be more elegantly executed (or more consistent quality-wise).  If Vibrant Forms can be said to have a flaw, it is actually that it is too flawless: Soublis' skill in achieving machine-like, trance-inducing perfection left absolutely no room for any distinct personality to come through.  That seems to have been precisely the point though.
 
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This is the first LP by this Northern California sound artist, but he has been active for almost a decade and is most closely associated with the scene around the excellent Root Strata label.  Students of Decay is another appropriate home for Davis though, as Ask the Dust (a rare John Fante reference!) offers up quite a bit of warm drone that also dabbles its toes a bit in stuttering electronic chaos, field recordings, and more formal composition.  Ultimately, it is a bit too chameleonic and intermittently pastoral to fully work for me as a complete work, but several of the individual pieces are quite wonderful.
The album begins with its one of its finest and most ambitious pieces, the 12-minute "Superpartner," which languorously and beautifully drifts through moods and motifs like a constantly shifting dream.  While quite a bit of it could reasonably be described as "drone," Davis rarely dwells on one theme for very long and embellishes even the simplest parts with unusual textures and gently hallucinatory sounds.  Also, the whole thing feels "real" rather than heavily laptop-processed (despite its occasional synth-y flanging and its electronically blurting and blooping crescendo), as John uses a lot of clear metallic textures and skillfully employs field recordings to provide a fleeting and unstable sense of place.
Unfortunately, the album starts to lose momentum a bit with the shorter "Joy Meridian" which treads into fairly straightforward "laptop drone" territory, albeit with harsher buzzing than usual and some hazily fluttering notes in the upper registers.  The following "Palestrina" returns to quite similar territory, but does so much more successfully, as it combines a lushly warm bed with a vibrant host of skipping, stuttering, and swelling sounds that reminds me of some of Area C's better work.
The album's centerpiece, the 16-minute "Synecdoche," initially seems to derail the album yet again, as it opens with a bittersweet, but far too pleasant and straightforward piano performance. Thankfully, that segment abruptly ends with a lot of clattering and crashing and the piece begins in earnest around the 4-minute mark with a sustained swell of heavenly synth thrum gradually made faintly uneasy by an unstably throbbing low-end.  After a mercifully brief segue into rather generic drone, Davis deftly steers the piece into significantly more disturbed territory with murky, uncomfortably dissonant harmonies before ultimately giving way to a quivering and twinkling treated-guitar coda.  Curiously, Davis then follows what would have been a fine ending with a few minutes of machine noise followed by the return of the piano, though it is artfully blurred and smeared this time around.
The closing "Julian Wind" provides an especially surreal and curious conclusion to an already very surreal and curious album, as it sounds like someone sadly playing a melodica by the ocean, only there seems to also be a steel band distantly playing underwater...and then it all ends with a very creepy and unsettling snatch of film or interview dialogue.  That was a great way to end the album, as it sharply reminded how pleasantly disorienting the entire experience had been.
On balance, Ask the Dust is very good album, but not an unqualified success by any means.  Rather, its many flaws are cancelled out by its admirable ambitions and masterful execution.  John Davis definitely did not set out to make a standard-issue drone album and he proved himself to be very good at realizing almost everything he set out to do–a noble effort was certainly made.  The only catch is that none of John's great ideas are given much time to fully bloom, nor do any motifs ever recur to give Ask the Dust the feel of something larger than a collection of five songs, unless the overarching narrative Davis was going for was "change is constant."  On the bright side, that also means that none of Davis's weaker ideas stick around for long, but I spent the bulk of the album alternately thinking "this is great!" and "wait- why are you stopping!?!"
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Although a similar CD was released by Sub Rosa 20 years ago, this is not a reissue but a re-recording, an amendment to that 1990 release. Here, Jean-Luc Fafchamps revisits one of Morton Feldman's most popular pieces and casts a new light on it. The themes, which Feldman had developed throughout his life as a composer, are all consolidated into one perfect piece of music. He picks up the delicate beauty of the piece in a different way to his previous recording, a truer rendition of the score but by no means negating the original release.
 
Especially towards the end of his life, Feldman had a keen interest in rugs made by nomadic groups from around the world. Recently, I had the chance to view some of his collection as part of a larger exhibition on Feldman and his personal and creative relationship with modern art. The design of these rugs, much like the paintings he loved so much, informed his own composition techniques. Feldman is well known for his graphic notation in place of traditional music notation and the rugs also influenced the way he conveyed music on paper; the score of Flute and Orchestra is directly comparable to a 19th century prayer rug from Turkey.
However, there are other relationships between his music and these rugs and Triadic Memories highlights at least one of these relationships. In many of the rugs Feldman collected (or at least those on display at the Irish Museum of Modern Art), the repetitive patterns that made up the designs seemed to warp and stretch (a "crippled symmetry" in Feldman's own words). In the same way, Triadic Memories is built up around repetitions of notes which change over time. The second or third notes in a three-note motif begin to elongate in comparison to the first or second appearance of the motif much like the designs on the rugs showed distortions in comparison to each other.
Repetitions are not just the main hallmark of this piece but the reason for this new recording entirely. Fafchamps originally released a version of Triadic Memories on Sub Rosa in 1990 which was based on a 1987 publication of the score. In that particular edition, there were directions over the notes to be repeated but they did not specify how many times the notes were to be repeated in each case so Fafchamps repeated the measures once and moved on to the next one. He later learned that the different measures had different numbers of repetitions associated with them (clarified on a later publication of the score which he works from here) and felt the need to re-record the piece.
This is a wonderful thing as this current recording is a beautiful (if rather fast in comparison to some of the other recordings by other pianists) version of Triadic Memories. The subtle shifts in the length of the notes and their exact pitch (what sounds like a repetition of an earlier measure is actually a semitone higher later on) give the impression of patterns reflected on water, the ripples breaking up the image while retaining its character perfectly. With this stretching of the music, Feldman's piece plays with the sensation of time. This is typical of Feldman's approach throughout his career as he used pauses and silences like his contemporaries in the visual arts used blank canvas and monochrome spaces to fix the various elements of their painting in to a composition. The notes and chords of Triadic Memories are suspended in the air like the forms of one of Franz Kline's black and white paintings or indeed any of Mark Rothko's later works. In particular, the bleeding of Rothko's colors into each other is directly comparable to Feldman’s stretching of the notes. Fafchamps masterfully conveys these ideas through his playing; his fingers brushing the keys rather than pressing them.
As aforementioned, the presence of this "corrected" recording of Triadic Memories does not replace a "faulty" version (Fafchamps himself recognizes this in the liner notes). Instead, this is purely an alternative view of the piece much like the longer renditions also out there (such as Marilyn Nonken's which pushes the piece to over 90 minutes). Like most modern composers, Feldman allowed for variation in a way that contemporary interpretations of classical music have usually stifled. This stretching of the composition, let alone the notes, again comes back to the Oriental rugs and their own wear and tear from use.
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This young singer-songwriter takes inspiration from Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis, among other folks, and will be opening his US tour this spring. In a refreshing twist, Vile has released the better album this year, outshining Mascis on his latest album (and most stripped-down to date).
Admittedly, perhaps part of the reason I find Kurt Vile's Smoke Ring for My Halo so much more vital and engaging than Mascis' Several Shades of Why (which I also covered this week) is that I am approaching Vile's work for the first time. This is his fourth collection of songs, but the first one I've given a close ear—oftentimes, I have found that sense of unfamiliar discovery can elevate music to a higher plane. Regardless, this is a strong album from Vile—ten spacious, endearing songs carved out of the American singer/songwriter tradition by a young man filled with talent, hopefully with a fruitful career yet ahead of him.
The songwriting on Smoke Ring for My Halo is more varied, and less overtly familiar, than on Mascis' album. Vile switches off between deft acoustic finger-picking ("Baby's Arms"), classic guitar rock ("Puppet to the Man") and stoned, sprawled-out jams ("Society Is My Friend") with ease, keeping me on my toes. The instrumentation on the majority of these songs is sparse, the production always intimate; each strum of Vile's guitar and slide of his fingers across the frets is captured like a firefly in a jar. Vile's lyrics sound casually tossed-off in an endearing way, never over-thought, and are complementary to his guitar playing, capturing the same sense of weary resignation that Mascis has perfected over the years.
Listened to side-by-side, Smoke Ring for My Halo is not worlds away from Several Shades of Why—like Mascis, Vile has a pleasant, smoky depth to his voice and an ability to convey his emotions through his distinctive guitar playing. The difference, then, is that Vile has made an album that feels like a spotlight on his creativity and talents, not a downplay of his strengths (as on Mascis' album). If allowed only one of these albums on my shelf, I would choose Smoke Ring for My Halo—it has proven itself a comfortable, low-key soundtrack as winter turns to spring.
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I have traditionally been a sucker for J Mascis—his songs with Dinosaur Jr capitalize on my favorite aspects of rock music, overflowing with hooks, distortion and blistering guitar solos. After two surprisingly excellent albums with the original Dinosaur Jr line-up, Mascis' first studio album under his own name asks listeners to take out their earplugs for a scaled-back, primarily acoustic effort.
J Mascis' songwriting remains distinctively his own on Several Shades of Why, his first solo album recorded in a proper studio. On Martin + Me and Live at CBGB's, Mascis played it rather safe, revisiting Dinosaur Jr material in a solo acoustic setting and throwing in additional cover songs; here, Mascis turns in a set of ten brand new, original songs. He also forgoes Dinosaur Jr band mates Lou Barlow and Murph for a rotating cast of collaborators, among them Sophie Trudeau (A Silver Mt. Zion/Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Pall Jenkins (The Black Heart Procession), Matt Valentine, and Kurt Vile (whose excellent new album, Smoke Ring for My Halo, I also covered this week).
On first listen, Mascis' knack for writing immediately classic-sounding hooks is intact—this album is enjoyable, at least initially, because Mascis knows how to turn out a pleasant, familiar-sounding tune. As with any musician with a recognizable style, though, Mascis struggles walking a fine line: finding a new spin on his formula versus retreading his old habits. On Several Shades of Why, Mascis leans toward the latter, not diverging noticeably from his songwriting methods; rather, he scales back the instrumentation—dull, acoustic arrangements with dragging tempos and less memorable hooks than his recent Dinosaur Jr material. As a result, Several Shades of Why is a chore to listen to while it's playing and a forgettable listen once it's over.
I get the impression that had Mascis not switched off his effects pedals and cranked down the volume, these might as well be Dinosaur Jr songs. Unfortunately, there's no fuzzy distortion for the tunes to hide behind, and Mascis' guitar solos are spread thinly; when his guitar does strike on occasion (as on "Where Are You"), it feel less like a searing-hot cauldron of water than a familiar childhood blanket. Mascis is good at what he does, but he does not engage me in a stripped-down, acoustic setting that spotlights the predictability of his songwriting. Can we assemble Mascis' wall of Fender amps and crank up the distortion for another Dinosaur Jr album, please?
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Eternal Tapestry's album on Thrill Jockey is their first widely available recording, coming on the heels of a slew of limited-press LP and CD-r releases the last couple years. It's a charming, low-key improvisational rock record that I found a bit of a "comfort food" listen, playing exactly to my tastes. While it doesn't strike me as especially innovative or mind-blowing among its peers, I find it a satisfying album, easy to get lost in start-to-finish each time I put it on.
Beyond the 4th Door is an album of patient, sprawling psychedelia. The songs flow seamlessly into one another and have a live-recorded feel to them, like a group of friends rented out an inexpensive studio for a couple hours, threw back a 12-pack of brews, strapped on their instruments and hit 'Record' for a night of casual, off-the-cuff playing. That's not to say the album is formless or uninteresting; the players involved have honed their skills with Jackie-O Motherfucker, Heavy Winged, Cloaks, and similar-minded bands, and their experience pays off in creating a cohesive listen without any moments that make me reach for the all-too-handy 'Skip' button.
The five songs on Beyond the 4th Door—to the extent that pieces of music without traditional verse-chorus structures and intelligible vocals are worth calling "songs"—are extended, improvised guitar workouts backed by a structured, evenly-paced rhythm section that lets the guitar interplay do most of the heavy lifting. The songs unfold and reveal their nuances in a way that reminds me of Popol Vuh, allowing instruments such as cymbals and horns to enter and leave the mix subtly, without disrupting the laid-back, cosmic tones that are always present.
"Galactic Derelict," at the album's midpoint, is when Eternal Tapestry trade the subtle, droning explorations of the first two songs for a fuller sound recalling Bardo Pond circa Lapsed—washes of heady, psychedelic distortion and feedback combined with dual, overlapping guitar lines. After "Galactic Derelict," the album reverts back to melodic, slightly bluesy guitar lines and relaxed tempos, permitting the album end in the same subtle way it began. Beyond the 4th Door is subtle, blissed-out psychedelia played with casual confidence.
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Eternal Tapestry's album on Thrill Jockey is their first widely available recording, coming on the heels of a slew of limited-press LP and CD-r releases the last couple years. It's a charming, low-key improvisational rock record that I found a bit of a "comfort food" listen, playing exactly to my tastes. While it doesn't strike me as especially innovative or mind-blowing among its peers, I find it a satisfying album, easy to get lost in start-to-finish each time I put it on.
I have always been a sucker for J Mascis—his songs with Dinosaur Jr overflow with hooks, distortion and blistering guitar solos. Mascis' first studio album under his own name, Several Shades of Why, is a primarily acoustic effort and, unfortunately, a forgettable listen. In a refreshing twist, Kurt Vile, who takes inspiration from Mascis and will be opening his US tour this spring, outshines him on his latest album (and most stripped-down to date), Smoke Ring for My Halo.