Thrill Jockey

The second long-player from the newly slimmed-down Baltimore three-piece is a quietly self-assured piece of work. J. Gerrit Welmers, William Cashion and Samuel T. Herring have been steadily forging their sound since 2003, and under the Future Islands banner since 2006. Baltimore has offered up a great array of cultural morsels to feast on in recent years: The Wire, of course, is the most notable of these; and it would be tantamount to critical suicide (on these pages at least) to neglect to mention Beach House; the (er) inimitable Montel Williams is arguably next on this list; and, with In Evening Air, Future Islands is a name that deserves to be added to that roll call.

The trio’s debut, Wave Like Home – released on UK label Upset The Rhythm in 2008 – somehow managed to slide under many a radar. If In Evening Air feels immediately less frenetic than its predecessor, it retains all of the urgent charm of that record, and distils the band’s graduated panorama of light and dark into a tidy yet unsettling package. This record is something of a homecoming – the group’s first proper US album release on the renowned Thrill Jockey label, it represents a honing of their (self-proclaimed) ‘post-wave’ sound. Synthesized soundscapes, bleeding and distorted around the edges, are fused with anxious and emotional percussion, whilst Herring’s growling, melodramatic vocals lead the merry march. 

From the first thumping beat and wavering chord of ‘Walking Through That Door’, In Evening Air throws its arms wide open to encase you in its feverish and at once fragile grip – think Joy Division meets Memory Tapes. Immediate draws include ‘Long Flight’, a punchy tale of love soured, and the sweet indie lullaby ‘Swept Inside’.

It is within the contrasts and fractures of this record that its true beauty lies, however. Tender storytelling pitched against terse gothic caricature pieces reveals the emotional range and maturity of a band that deserves more attention than they have been paid thus far. The psychedelic ice-cream van synth of single ‘Tin Man’ lures you into a theatrical world wherein Herring’s vocal really packs a punch. To my own great annoyance, his style has been described elsewhere as indescribable, a move akin to founding an anarchists’ union. For me, Herring is of the stage, his voice encapsulating tragedy and comedy in a slightest turn. Whether a whisper, rumble or a roar, it’s certainly never disingenuous or without context, and cements the cohesive aural journey on which the threesome have set to lead you. Some of this drama is best seen on the thrusting ‘Inch of Dust’, a track Bowie would have sold his drum and bass period for. 

Dust down your wallet: In Evening Air gives you good bang for your buck. Much more than the sum of its constituent parts, Future Islands have delivered another triumph for B’more. Watch out, Montel! 

In general, music has motion, a wide girth so to say. It pushes itself in many ways, some progressions understandable, like Kraftwerk influencing hip hop, some strange, like how Lily Allen got cool and now writes decent songs. Yes, that’s right; from Kraftwerk to Lily Allen. There is method to this madness. It’s just that, simply, most music tries to evolve through experimentation and create fresh new genres. Granted, some music doesn’t. Pop straddles the same circulatory chain while trumping up slightly varied chord patterns in a bid to detonate something original, but with all those haunting instrumental bands like Mogwai and Godspeed and here Tortoise, PROGRESSION is the name of the game.

After a good long break Tortoise have released their latest; Beacons of Ancestorship. More than a decade ago, critics were drooling over their ability to tear apart pre-conceived genres – krautrock, dub, ambient, acid jazz – and meld it into one post-rock melting pot. Their sound was an earthy low-fi one, built on engineering effects and instruments and moods all into one surging ten armed beast. There was something very, very clever and cool and frankly, brilliant about some of their stuff; 1996’s Millions Now Living… and 98’s TNT. 

Maybe it’s actually EXPERIMENTATION that’s the name of the game. Because with this latest Tortoise offering, that is actually what’s missing. It’s as if Tortoise have just got bored and fed up experimenting. Like the lonely single man, he eventually just wants to find stability and settle down. Do we have five full, fed up lonely single men finding their stability and making their homes? OK, maybe not lonely, probably not even single but definitely, it would seem, losing their creative sharpness.

Beacons of Ancestorship is not ambient in the way Brian Eno might well seduce us. Nor is it ‘the quiet before the storm’ in much the way Mogwai formulate over and over. It is not interesting enough like Efterklang or Godspeed. It is just really rather dull and boring. Northern Something and Gigantes – three and four tracks in respectively - are the best on offer here, and one of them is only two and a half minutes long. Most of the album resembles fuzzy, slappy stuff. Imagine if you will what Grizzly Bear would sound like on valium, if they kicked the singer out and were left alone with some crap Casio keyboards and a drum kit. This is by no means severe.

If instrumental post-rock, as a genre, sailed free of the continents as a mass of towering ice a hundred stories high domineering in its linear drift; then this album is the ice cube that flakes off it and disappears, weeping and dissolving into the sea amounting to nothing.

Mouse on Mars maestro Jan St Werner delivers yet more experimental noise - this time in the guise of Lithops - in an early 2009 release where each track was made for various art instillation pieces over a number of years, creating not so much an album as a collection of one offs. Consequently Ye Viols is a record without any real coherence or flow. This does not mean it isn’t a good album and or one worthy of a listen, it’s just a difficult one to dive straight into.

The trouble with listening to something like this is you really don't get the whole perspective necessary to appreciate it. We can only presume the real sensory experience is only achieved in the setting for which the music was written for. This is very much evident on ‘in nitro’, ‘apps 1’ and ‘apps 2‘. Each one a very accomplished electronica, but all three cry out to be played in a gallery setting. Elsewhere ‘sebquenz’ starts off very strongly and mixes what sounds like futuristic cuckoo clocks with electronic base and it really does get the head nodding. Towards the end you hear voices speaking in the background and it really does convey the feel of a gallery.

A couple of tracks that can stand apart from the concept though are opener ‘Graf‘, and with even greater potency, the latter-sitting ‘Penrose Avenue‘. ‘Graf’ is quite tribal in its rhythms before descending into clicks and beeps, while standout ‘Penrose Avenue’ has a somewhat more organic sound with bubbling noise coming through the speakers, to firstly be replaced with layered strands of increasing noise and then ending abruptly.

Ye Viols is very much a sound collage, where Werner is the sculpture trying to craft multi layered soundscapes, and fair play to him.

Even considering High Places’ intricate, inventive and intriguing electronic make up, were the Brooklyn boy/girl duo any more understated to the initial ear, they’d almost certainly lose the listener completely. Mary Pearson and Robert Barber’s full length debut - following on from the fantastically-received first Emusic and then Thrill Jockey released collection of singles 03/07 - 09/07 - is so sparse, offbeat and a frankly right tricky bugger, that this writer must confess to being lost before being forever-gratefully found. ’High Places’ has gone from two to three to four stars in such a hypnotic manner that it’s near impossible to explain any initial misgivings.

Their’s, over time, is a fascinating sound, pitching somewhere between a frame-by-frame rewound version of El Guincho or Panda Bear and a torch bearer to the innovative bits-and-bob production techniques of Coldcut. ’The Storm’ opens with a flurry of artificial steel drums that are then married with all manner of scene-setting glitches and tricks up Barber’s sleeve before Pearson’s unfussy yet increasingly mesmeric 80’s 4AD-style vocals slide in. It’s about as instantaneous and straightforward as things get when songs like ‘Vision’s The First’ - a gloriously unsettling fusion reminiscent of Clint Mansell’s tougher Requiem For A Dream soundtracking compositions - lie ahead.

The bounding ‘Gold Coin’, Orient-tinged ‘Golden’ and simply breathtaking closer ‘From Stardust to Sentience’ - Barber’s beats are almost modernly savage on all three - similarly reach the eventually expansive heights in a record that ultimately becomes the most rewarding of listens. There are few greater sensations for a listener than ‘getting an album’ and fewer still when the utmost of patience is required. Maybe I’m just slow or maybe this barely-scraping-the 30-minute-mark record will pass many by but please, strap on the earphones, grab a cup of tea or three and give High Places the time they deserve.