'Man Is Not A Bird' echoes 'Pendulum' rhythmically but the vocals are less urgent, more sullen and melancholic - just as haunting overall but why 'degrade' themselves with all that eh? but this song really should come out with a video and get played - i see no reason why not, or why it couldn't get in the charts. considering 'Come On Lets Go' was ignored by everyone but Peel listeners anyway, this is the second stab at palatable radio-friendly single - the closest they'll ever get to it anyway. 'Before We Begin' is the number one song in heaven. the interrupted verses and the interrupting chorus of "man is not a bird". those impossibly prickly sounds at the end of "winter now" set against the blurry strings.
"pen expers", "to here knows when" again). and "the little bell" has that NASA-processing alien information sound in the background, that stuff always kills me - some impossibly urgent message fighting against the technology of its medium to be heard, a staged battle of signal vs noise (cf. when that queasy keening dips into pure corrupt-hard-disk density. S'not with it's successes tho: i think it was marcello who chided boards of canada for lazily appropriating abstract loveless sound smear in place of other ideas please, but "valerie" is one of the few songs i've heard that's really learnt the (RIGHT!) lessons of "to here knows when" (the only exceptional mbv song/vacuum cleaner preset in my humble estimation). a fair amount of the (i need a value-neutral word for the songs/tracks.) music seems to lack a stong center, so everything gets thrown into the mix as compensation. which is not to say it's uninteresting or unlistenable, but a little disappointing when the strength of previous broadcast stuff was in how they negotiated the song/sound balance so astoundingly well and let you know when a sound was meant to be doing all the emotional work (there's nothing here as gorgeously empty as "echo's answer").
a lot of these tracks feel needlessly overbusy, an album of almost uninterrupted maximalism (save for the occasional outro/coda) ('maximalism' is relative i should add, we're not in max tundra tundra yet). Being more of a sound guy than a song guy myself, i wouldn't have expected that to be a problem, but it pretty much is.
0 kommentar(er)
