After most of the tracks on Emancipator's Soon It Will Be Cold Enough came up on my downtempo electronica station, I felt like I had to review it sooner or later. I trust Pandora enough that when it feels I'll like something that much, I give it a chance. It's usually right, and in this case it is, though not without reservations.
Emancipator is Douglas Appling, an artist out of Portland who seems to have burst self-formed out of the Zeus of that culture's music scene. He released Soon and within a few years and one more album release formed his own label, Loci Records. He's now touring solo and has also toured with Pretty Lights, a true titan of the genre. Since Soon he's put out four other studio albums that I haven't yet had the pleasure of hearing, and though his first offering might fall short in a few places, it shows enough thought, depth and craft that I'm anxious to finish out this review so that I can go listen to his more recent releases.
Soon starts with "Eve", one of its strongest tracks, a melancholy number that mixes piano, assorted rhythm samples, and a soothing but also haunting female voice. "Eve" holds together very well and guides us through heights and valleys without forcing the point. Its blisteringly fast beats don't conflict with the twinkling of the piano melody and the ghostly character of the voice that we want to hear more of, but never quite do. Moreover, they combine and weave together nicely. It's this weaving and smooth combination on "Eve" that makes "First Snow", two tracks later, easily the strongest song on the album and the one that I keep coming back to week after week. "First Snow" also plays with samples of speech appropriated from other sources, a technique that comes all the way from Dark Side of the Moon, but its holistic use in Soon reminds me most of the way speech samples were used so expertly in Endtroducing..... by DJ Shadow. I can't help but be reminded of "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt", despite the differences between the two tracks.
Other parts of Soon are appealing as well. "Maps" has a well textured background to contrast against its piercing piano, and the inclusion of audio from Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the southern polar regions are a masterstroke in how they are placed as an epilogue to that track. Ultimately, though, the concept that I keep coming back to in trying to describe the experience is texture, and it's here that Soon leaves me with a yearning I can't quite place. Trip hop is largely about different kinds of sounds with very different timbral qualities bumping around in the same staff space, and sometimes the album achieves this well. Some tracks, especially in the meandering middle of the album, seem to rely on unique sounds too much in lieu of complexity of notes and phrases.
The greatest failing of Soon is that I seem to want ten percent more of something that I can't articulate. Ten percent more kinds of sounds, ten percent more interplay of notes, ten percent more background texture. "Smoke Signals" is a good example of this, as is the title track, "Soon It Will Be Cold Enough To Start Fires". Many tracks feel like they want to build to something, some musical exclamation point or question mark, but never do. Small and minimalist can work, of course; see Boards of Canada. But many of Soon's tracks seem just a bit too fast paced and rhythmic to really work as quiet meditations, even though they seem to want to. That they're also too slow and thoughtful to work as upbeat dancy tracks is beside the point, though a few ("Father King") feel like they're leaning in that direction.
For a first release, however, Soon has plenty to recommend it. What it needs is not polish around the edges, but expansion and elaboration at its core. And, as I mentioned before, enough tracks really do hit the mark in a solid and memorable way that I'm excited to hear the rest of Emancipator's work, which is probably the best thing to take away from an artist's first album.
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