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Evan Caminiti, "Meridian"
As much as I have enjoyed both Barn Owl and Evan Caminiti’s solo work in the past, his career has certainly been an unusual and chameleonic one, generally alternating between heady drone and his own particular strain of desert rock.  In theory, that history of creative restlessness should have prepared me for Meridian, but I truly did not see this monster of a synthesizer album coming.  The surprise is not that Caminiti’s guitar is nowhere to be heard or even that he made an entirely electronic album–it is that his first foray in this direction is such a mesmerizing tour de force that effortlessly transcends the rest of the synthesizer pack (and most of Evan's own previous discography).
For all of my griping about the cloying trendiness and general glut of synthesizer albums, I certainly still wind up listening to a hell of a lot of them for some reason.  Unsurprisingly, there are several recurring issues that I find irksome, but the main one (aside from gear fetishism) is that so many artists are so insistent on recording "live" with no overdubs, placing the purity of the performance above their actual compositions.  In some cases, that spontaneity and simplicity work quite well (Alessandro Cortini and Sam Prekop spring to mind), but in a lot of cases I find myself wondering how much better an album could have been if it that performance had been expanded into something more ambitious and multilayered.  Evan and I apparently see eye to eye on that, as his talents as a composer and producer more than keep pace with his abilities as a musician on Meridian (to quite a striking degree, actually).  While most of the songs themselves are very good, the real magic often lies in what Evan does with them, transforming his ideas into densely buzzing, rich, and dynamic works of beauty.  This is a massive-sounding and complexly layered album from start to finish and it is clear that a great deal of time was spent obsessing over details and textures (and not spent in vain).
Curiously, Evan buries most of his strongest pieces quite late in the album.  My personal favorite is probably "Signal," which marries a gently burbling backdrop to an eerie host of quivering, strangled, and dissonantly harmonizing sustained tones.  It strike a wonderful balance between John Carpenter-worship/retro-kitsch and something much more ugly and visceral.  Such dissonance is far from the norm, however, as most of Meridian's other highlights center around seamless, stunning transitions or passages of warm, immersive beauty.  "Excelsior," for example, opens as a hypnotically rippling and throbbing drone piece that gradually becomes increasingly sizzling and pulsating.  Then, suddenly, it all gives way to a simple, heavenly thrum that is propelled along by hollow percussion and sonar-like pings as its edges gradually fray into distortion.  "Steam" is yet another gem, buzzing and throbbing along amiably with a lurching beat until something that sounds like a broken carousel fades in, tearing the song into a series of alien, shattered-sounding pulses swelling out of a vibrant and dense bedrock of sputtering sub bass.
The sole area in which Meridian falls short of greatness is that a number of the songs end somewhat abruptly, as if Caminiti was not sure quite where to go once he reached the crescendo.  That is a little weird, since he otherwise transitions between themes quite seamlessly and often ingeniously.  Fortunately, the album's strong points greatly outweigh that one quibble.  In fact, they absolutely bury it–there is no end to the number of things that I could praise about this album.  It essentially feels like Caminiti set out to make an excellent synthesizer album, succeeded, then threw himself wholeheartedly into artfully breaking it and purging it of as many derivative tropes as possible.  No beat is ever straightforward (they all wobble, lurch, stutter, echo, and/or quickly dissipate) and no motif is ever safe from collapsing upon itself, being torn apart, or being transformed into a sizzling, crackling ghost of itself.  I love that.  This is a huge leap forward for Evan Caminiti.
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