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Implodes, "Recurring Dream"
While it definitely boasted some of the year's best cover art (I am a sucker for shadowy figures wielding curved blades), Implode's 2011 Kranky debut (Black Earth) occupied a fairly unappealing niche for me, offering up a lot of bleak, slow-motion shoegaze with too much processing and too few hooks.  Two years later, Recurring Dream offers more great cover art and more brooding effects pedal abuse, but the band have definitely grown quite a bit better at what they do.  It is still a bit of a slog to make it through the entire album, but the handful of highlights are great enough to make it worth the effort.
After deceptively opening with a brief bit of creepily Lynchian synth ambiance ("Wendy 2"), Implodes completely blindsided me with "Scattered in the Wind," which sounds as close to a hit single as this band will ever come.  All of the usual haze and sustain-heavy guitar soloing remain in place, as do Matt Jencik's  narcotized vocals, but it is greatly enlivened by a meaty bass riff and insistently pulsing guitarwork.  Also, the decision to double Jencik's vocals with bassist Emily Elhaj's gives the song a more compelling and distinctive dynamic than is usual.  Those seem like such a simple tweaks to the Implodes' sound, but they make such an enormous difference.  I am far more likely to put up with (or even enjoy) a band's indulgences if they are presented with at least one concretely gratifying thing to hold it all together (charisma, power, rhythm, a strong melody, whatever).  "Scattered in the Wind" boasts several such elements and totally kills as a result.
The quartet unexpectedly out-do themselves yet again two songs later with the hallucinatory synth ambiance of "Zombie Regrets," which (to my ears) is probably the best piece they have ever recorded.  For one, it is short enough that it does not overstay its welcome.  More significantly, however, its dreamy idyll is brilliantly disrupted by thick, vibrato-heavy swells of melody.  In a way, "Zombie Regrets" is a microcosm that illustrates everything that is both wrong and right with Implodes, as it works so beautifully for three reasons: 1.) it offers an unexpected twist on something relatively familiar, 2.) its various components are both strong and clear, and 3.) it has immediacy and physicality.
Missing the third part is often Implodes' fatal flaw, as their guitars are generally so heavily processed that they feel floating and detached.  That is fine if there is something else to provide a song's heft (ie- Elhaj's bassline in "Scattered in the Wind"), but that does not occur as frequently as it needs to.  Also, a lot of Implodes songs lack a strong central motif, which makes them feel more like delivery systems for cool guitar solos than actual memorable songs.  Granted, the quartet have a real knack for creating an appealingly heavy and/or drugged mood, but the songs quickly blur together when there are not clear hooks to make them stand-out.
Fortunately, Implodes' talent for the unexpected resurfaces in a few other pieces to dazzling effect.  For example, the crescendo of "Necronomics" sounds like a time-stretched A Place to Bury Strangers getting sucked into a black hole, while "Wouldn't You Know It" features some awesomely evil-sounding vibrato over the top of its dirge-y chord progression.  Touches like that proved to be the tipping point for me: I definitely like this band now.
Recurring Dream is not necessarily a great album, but its best moments make it clear that Implodes are no ordinary band.  Rather, they seem to be a band with extraordinary vision struggling with uncharted territory (shoegaze meets cosmic horror and the cold enormity of space?).  That is a tall order.  In fact, I would not have thought such a thing were possible or desirable before hearing this album.  For now, Implodes have only captured fleeting glimpses of that elusive vision, but those glimpses are glorious.
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