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Raime, "Quarter Turns Over a Living Line"
After a tantalizing two-year trickle of 12" singles and an EP, this unrelentingly bleak UK post-industrial duo have finally released a full album.  It was an event that I awaited with a mixture of anticipation and dread, however, as Raime had announced earlier that they had moved towards employing mostly live instrumentation, a decision that has historically not gone well for most electronic artists.  It certainly went well here though, as this is easily Raime's finest effort to date and a truly impressive evolution besides.
I have long been amazed by Raime's relative popularity, as it seems like they have always been quite intent on being as cold and alienating as possible since their inception.  Aside from the generally dank, claustrophobic, and airless feel of their work, they seem to be post-everything, eschewing anything resembling hooks or propulsive rhythms in favor of gloomy atmospheres and oddly shivering, slow motion beats.  Perversely, Quarter Turns takes some of those tendencies to an even further extreme while also unexpectedly dissipating the duo's characteristic suffocating darkness a bit.
On the "maximizing alienation" front, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead have taken their already sparse, anxious beats into an even less danceable place this time around.  While a couple of pieces maintain the skittering, dubstep-inflected beats of their previous releases, like "The Last Foundry" (a superior reprise of The Raime EP's "This Foundry"), most of the others are based upon a straightforward, glacial thump that is far more "death march" than "dancefloor".  The opening "Passed Over Trail" is subversive in yet another way, dispensing with a beat entirely, but offering some awesomely shuddering and distressed sub-bass in its place.
While I certainly enjoy such acts of genre subversion and stylistic contrarianism, this album would get boring very fast if that was the sole extent of Raime's evolution.  Fortunately (and much to my surprise), the switch to live instrumentation provides the perfect counterbalance to the duo's escalating aversion to rhythm.  In fact, Raime do not make a single false, clumsy, or unnecessary instrumental move.  The mood, of course, remains as blackened as ever, but the subtle intrusion of human warmth and organic textures provides a necessary contrast that has been missing up until now, as the combination of sparse bleakness and bloodless artificiality was a bit too much for me to take in any kind of large dose.
The most beautiful manifestations of this new balance come at the end of the album.  In "Your Cast Will Tire," rattling, bowed guitar strings provide a sharp and visceral backbone while a mutant waltz beat and the coloration in the periphery create a deliciously escalating tension.  Then, in "The Dimming of Road and Rights," a simple violin motif unfolds over a lurching thump and an ominous repeating bass note.  While it does not replicate the satisfying dynamic trajectory of its predecessor, it maintains a fragile and eerie beauty for its entire duration and offers some extremely cool and creative flourishes besides, like the occasion snarl of something halfway between guttural human speech and guitar noise or the presence of a second beat that sounds too distant to actually be part of the song.
While those highlights admittedly occur quite deep into the album, Quarter Turns is a remarkably strong, varied, listenable, and intelligently sequenced whole.  There are a few instances where pieces take time to build, but the pay-off is always inevitably worth the wait as each of these seven songs are successful and memorable in their own way.  In most cases, that way is textural, as Andrews and Halstead are able to wrestle some impressively gnarled and scorched noises out of their instruments and they are clever enough to provide ample space for their ingeniously ravaged sounds to be properly heard and felt.  In fact,  I doubt there is anything that could be improved about this album.  It is almost certainly too skeletal and shadowy to offer much in the way of widespread appeal, but I am sure Raime have no interest in that at all–they accomplished exactly what they wanted to do masterfully, hauntingly, and distinctively.  This is a serious contender for my favorite album of the year.
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