review: soon it will be cold enough

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.

review: and the moon was hungry

Morgan is weird. It's hard to describe in exactly what way her music is weird. I mean, I could say that she sounds like dark symphonic pop-metal mixed with nightmare cabaret mixed with 1950s lounge singers mixed with Amy Winehouse, but that doesn't actually mean anything unless you're intimately familiar with all those genres and performers AND have a good musical imagination. And if that's the case, then you've probably already heard of the Album and are getting some tracks off YouTube as you read. For the rest of us, I'll have to do a whole damn article.

I first discovered "...and the moon was hungry...", her album with The Romanovs (which she fronts), through Pandora. Honestly, I discover most music through Pandora these days, and I'm usually impressed and heartened to discover the degree to which tiny and otherwise totally unknown performers have penetrated the medium. "King" was the song that got me to create a new station based on it, which is always a good sign when that happens. This track sounded a lot like half the tracks on Fallen by Evanescence, and yet despite what you might think that's actually a compliment coming from me. I really liked the album and still do.

I expected more of that kind of heavy and layered harmonic sound from the other tracks, but was pleasantly disappointed on hearing tracks like "China Shop". This is where the piano comes to the front, and her strategic use of expletives and silent spaces speaks to Amy Winehouse. Sometimes that silence can seem a little jarring when it comes in the midst of that heavy layering, like on "Kiss", but maybe that's the point. Kiss is actually the weirdest track, the one that convinced me to write this review rather than a short paragraph as an incitation to listen. I can't place it. At one point it descends into a folk-carnival dance that seems appropriately out of place, as though we've been trained to expect the unexpected. Nevertheless, the album seems to always return to the dark layering reminiscent of the best of Evanescence, but with beautifully obtuse lyrics.

It's no coincidence that the most common artist to come up on my Pandora station inspired by her is Florence + The Machine. This might be the best way to describe The Romanovs. But if Florence is the sun, burning bright in majesty, then Morgan is the moon, covering us in milky shadows. She's the glorious and sickly negative of Florence. Morgan is quiet when Florence is loud, loud when she's quiet; Morgan inspires doubt where Florence gives us confidence. Florence lifts us up; Morgan drags us down to drown in her aural swamp. And what a sweet drowning it is. To borrow a phrase: 10/10; would drown again.