Amid all the
angst-ridden sameness and cacophonous feedback wracking today’s
alternative scene, it’s nice to know that the maligned genre of
independent folk music remains alive and well (if unheralded),
and that there’s still plenty of it to choose from. The Twin
Atlas occupy the style’s highly accessible middle ground --
similar territory to the Skygreen Leopards, perhaps a bit more
masculine and less affected than The Sea And Cake, while not
quite so hauntingly majestic as Songs Of Green Pheasant. With
their leisurely guitar signatures, ambrosial vocals, and
home-recorded closeness, Sean Byrne and Lucas Zaleski have taped
some great porch-sippin’ musicality here, a sure bet to modulate
your blood pressure before that satisfying afternoon nap.
Technically,
Magic Car Wash constitutes a “supplementary session” of
instrumentals and leftovers culled from 2005’s more countrified
SunTownship. But truth to tell that record’s lethargic
and overly homogenized pace never came close to winning me over.
This latest release, while certainly no barnburner, sports a far
more varied and picturesque tone than its predecessor, and some
darn impressive acoustic interplay too. The ineffably mysterious
“ETA Two” incubates a rising ripples-on-a-lake guitar wash
behind the main instrumental melody that must have taken days to
get just right — starting at or near inaudibility, it slowly
builds as the main riff gently fades away, until somehow wholly
taking over the song for itself. And when he does sing (on about
half the tracks), Byrne’s voice is smooth and sweet as rum,
floating along atop the melodies with soft-hewn delight. It’s a
talent that can be hard to quantify — as well as achieve — but
for some reason the discrete components of Magic Car Wash
all seem to intertwine just right, meshing perfectly in service
of a higher relaxing purpose.
***
Porcupine Tree
Album:Stupid Dream
Released: April
6, 1999
Label: Snapper
Track to Try:
“Piano Lessons” -
An arresting
cerebral experience, and one of the best rock albums of 1999,
Stupid Dream is the reason the rest of Porcupine Tree’s
10-year catalogue can’t help but disappoint. With its disturbing
collage of misspent love, misplaced children, and misty
backstage heroism, the record manages to turn Radiohead and all
its clones on their collective head, attaining heights of
clarity and inspired vision that band only dreamt of. It should
come as no surprise that Steven Wilson and Co. have yet to top
it.
It’s hard to
give short shrift to a single tune on this near-masterpiece. Our
journey into neo-prog madness begins with the epic strains of
the seven-minute “Even Less”, which boasts one of those
drum-filled hole-in-the-guitar progressions capable of melting
the very stars from the sky; the amped six-string detonation,
which launches the song, ranks among the great album openings,
bar none. Then comes the deceptively propulsive “Piano Lessons,”
whose slicing slide guitar is all but guaranteed to haunt your
dreams; after which Stupid Dream’s most sober and
affecting track, the spare romantic lament “Pure Narcotic,” hits
it all on the head: “You find me wanting...You find me
bloodless, but inspired.” And on it goes. The band’s
instrumentation and song-writing are both impeccably full-bore,
and throughout it all Wilson puts what I consider the finest
pipes in rock music to splendid use, calibrating his mellifluous
pitch to match every note. But the album’s ace in the hole has
got to be its wildly inventive recording-studio wizardry:
Stupid Dream reminds the listener just how atmospheric a
bunch of digitized ones and zeroes can be; all you need is the
right talent and mood backing them up.
