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Natural Snow Buildings, "Waves of the Random Sea"
More than a decade into their career, the evolution of Natural Snow Buildings continues to surprise me: Waves of the Random Sea might be the most accessible album that Mehdi and Solange have released to date (in a good way, fortunately).  It might also be their masterpiece.  In any case, they've clearly made a lot of progress in broadening their palette of moods, as there is not much here that could be categorized as crushing, menacing, seething with dread, or oppressively sad.  Instead, this album occupies somewhat lighter, more spacious territory and is mostly filled with drone-tinged, temporally ambiguous acoustic folk instrumentals (albeit of the most lysergic and warped variety).  More importantly, it is absolutely amazing.  This is one of the most vibrant and multilayered albums that I have ever heard.
This is a very coherent and thoughtfully sequenced (double) album, something that Mehdi and Solange have become increasingly adept at in recent years.Waves of the Random Sea works quite nicely as a whole and it works equally well as two separate halves.  That separation of the two albums is even preserved on the CD version, as the third piece, "Breaches Through the Layers of Fog," concludes with roughly a minute of silence.  Interestingly, however, the two halves bisect quite differently on the CD and LP versions, with the brilliant first half of the album ending with either the post-coital-sounding warmth of "Breaches" (CD) or the disquieting, theremin-happy, sci-fi weirdness of "Abduction Dream."  There are some other differences between the two versions of the album as well, ranging from subtle editing and track length changes to an excellent LP-only drone piece entitled "Split Realm," which seems far more like an album highlight than a bonus track.
As alluded to earlier, the first half of this album approaches perfection. It may very well be the most consistently mesmerizing and beautiful forty-minute stretch in the entire Natural Snow Buildings discography.  "Waves of the Random Sea" begins the album with flanging drones and quivering swells before turning into a hypnotically repeating and surprisingly melodic acoustic guitar and tambourine interlude.  Those two motifs set the tone for the album's entire first half, which can best be summarized by saying that I feel like I am covertly witnessing a pagan/medieval/morbid fairy tale/ritualistic acoustic ensemble performing in a clearing in the woods while the very fabric of reality shudders and occasionally ruptures around them and a murder of nearby crows caws ominously.
Even that doesn't quite do it justice, however, as it fails to mention that Mehdi and Solange manage to sound like a full drum circle and a half dozen musicians wielding an eclectic array of tamburas and other stringed instruments playing together at once. Nor does it take into account that the production and layering throughout is quite stunning, as sounds seamless drift in and out of the mix and pan and shimmer hypnotically.  Or that the woozily twinkling coda of "Breaches Through the Layers of Fog" feels like waking up after a long beautiful dream.  There are also a number of great details that I could zero in on as well (like the increasingly prominent scrapes of a finger sliding from fret to fret in "Breaches"), but the important thing is that the first three songs constitute pure drone/psych heaven.
The second half, on the other hand, is merely great (although the added "Split Realm" evens the score a bit on the vinyl version).  The centerpiece here is the twenty-minute epic "Drift the Water Soul," which morphs into a prolonged bed of glistening, shuddering drone after an introduction that sounds like ceremony music for some sort of royal medieval procession.  One thing about the drone section that amazes is me is how alive and organic it feels–all the various components shiver, drift, and swell with such seamlessness that it is hard to remember that there are two actual people with instruments and a mixer weaving it all together.  Each sound seems intimately connected with every other sound and they all seem to react to subtle shifts around them.
"The Still Desert" concludes the album in much the same fashion, though it is nicely enhanced this time around by a complicated tapestry of cymbals, acoustic guitars, and pipes as well as a heartbreakingly strangled-sounding trumpet.  Again, an important CD/LP difference makes an appearance here, as the vinyl version slowly fades and shivers to a close, while the CD ends with brief and perversely sweet vocal piece by Mehdi in which he repeatedly assures me that my home is where I’m happy.  It's an unexpected way to end the album, but a very effective one: by the end of Waves of the Random Sea, I feel like I have just returned to reality after a very long and weird journey.  I've not sure that I'm necessarily happy that I am back, but it is nice to have some time to process what I just experienced.
Assessing the superiority of the vinyl vs. the CD version is thankfully made quite easy by the fact that Solange's cover art is characteristically striking and better appreciated in larger form.  However, both albums are absolutely stellar–they're just a bit different.  Oddly, it took me a few listens to fully warm to this release, as I was initially startled by how comparatively "pastoral" it is at times.  It also seemed quite puzzling that Mehdi hardly sings at all and that there are no majestically dense drone passages.  However, the more I listen to the album, the more I find myself utterly baffled by my initial reaction.  The depth, complexity, focus, imagination, and ambition of this album are all pretty spectacular, even by Natural Snow Buildings standards.  Waves of the Random Sea is essential.  I love this.
 
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