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Aquarelle, "August Undone"
Aquarelle's second album for Students of Decay caught me off-guard a bit, as Ryan Potts' aesthetic has evolved noticeably from 2011's Sung in Broken Symmetry, but not in the expected way at all.  Rather than playing up his talents for crackle, hiss, and artful obfuscation, August Undone mostly jettisons those elements in favor of a kind of a jacked-up, guitar-noise-heavy pastoralism.  While I was a little disappointed that none of the new pieces were immediately striking as Symmetry's "With Verticals," this more understated follow-up is a more complex, varied, and lushly absorbing whole.
"With/Without" opens the album with a very strong statement of intent and foreshadowing of what is to come, as its warm tones and unusual, sitar-like guitar ripples are almost immediately engulfed by a dense guitar thrum mingled with washes of static or crashing waves.  Eventually, the eruption subsides and the piece returns to a variation on its original motif, only this time the sublimely floating guitars cohere into a pulsing rhythm accompanied by some understated percussion.
Perhaps feeling that he may have erred too much on the side of "nice" with the lead-off piece, Potts opts for a bed of heavily distorted guitar for the lengthy "This is No Monument."  Well, at first, anyway.  That piece quickly takes an unexpected detour too, blossoming into a simple, repeating piano pattern that initially resembles classical minimalism, but gradually becomes looser and more sustained until it dissipates entirely into warmly droning reverie.  It might be least lazy drone reverie that I have ever heard though, as Potts turns it into something vibrant and unusual with a host of buried noises and something that resembles several guitarists tremolo-picking variations of the same arpeggio at once on treated guitars (they have an oddly metallic, harpsichord-like texture).
The second half of August Undone is less prone to unexpected twists and detours, but is not at all lacking in strong themes.  In fact, I prefer it to the first half.  "A Flare," for example, resembles a particularly hallucinatory gondola trip, as its bright, shimmering chord progression sounds vaguely Spanish or Italian, but it is bolstered by a second-half geyser of gnarled, shoe-gaze-damaged guitar roar.  "Sandpaper Winds," on the other hand, is a fairly straightforward drone piece structure-wise, but it transcends that wonderfully through inspired multilayering and a host of complementary textures (buzzing guitar noise; reverb-heavy piano plinking; sharp, clear acoustic guitar strums; high, melancholy-sounding EBow tones, etc.).
Potts opts for a similar structure for the strong closer "Clockless Hours," but nicely enhances his quivering, oscillating guitar shimmer with some swooping and moaning cello from guest Brandon Wiarda.  More than any other piece on the album, "Clockless Hours" demonstrates that Potts has become a serious and formidable composer–it is very easy to imagine someone of Harold Budd's stature recording something similar and thinking "This is one of the best things that I have ever done."
Potts' greatest gift, however, might be as a producer: while he admittedly had some mastering assistance from the omnipresent James Plotkin, some of these pieces reportedly used all 64 tracks of Ryan's digital workstation and it sounds like it.  I mean that in the best possible way, as there is an enormous amount of small-scale and peripheral activity happening at all times, making August Undone sound very engaging and alive.  Equally impressive, Potts managed to juggle all of those tracks without  ever sounding muddy or overblown.
Since I am me, I (of course) still have some small quibbles, but they mostly relate to my extremely subjective taste, as I wish August Undone's warmth and beauty had been balanced out by a bit more dissonance, chaos, and grit.  There are certainly a lot of roaring, distorted guitar passages to be found, but only  "A Flare" gets gnarled enough to offer any threat to Ryan's meticulously crafted idyll, as most of the other eruptions seem intended to provide heft and texture only (the oceanic immensity of prime shoegaze is there, but none of the edge or warp-age).  More objectively, Potts could also benefit from a lighter touch in regard to said eruptions, as it sometimes seems like they are operating from an on/off switch rather than intertwining organically with the other sounds.  Such concerns are very minor when compared to August Undone's successes, however–this is both an excellent album and an impressive evolution.
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