reviews
Brian Eno
Panic Of Looking Warp
Poems for spaced-out academics
welding the metal and ital halves of their wax collection together. It’s a trick the band has been practicing for several albums and tours now, but IV shows that maybe it just can’t be done. Reconciling double-kick drums and wall-thick guitars with reggae’s spatially deconstructed sibling is the challenge at hand, but this record remains a claustrophobic affair that finds the brawnier genre smothering the other. “Noise” and “Patient Zero” are mediocre cuts of instrumental metal with only the most timid of gestures toward dub, while the echoic drum patterns of “En Passant” mostly call to mind a bored engineer having fun with the mixing console. —Jakob Dorof
This EP presents six outtakes from Brian Eno’s last album, Drums Between The Bells, a collaboration with poet Rick Holland. Holland supplies the lyrics—or, more properly, words—as the “songs” are spoken, not sung. Holland’s poems share the characteristics of Eno’s music: Like the thoughts that pass through the mind just as you’re falling asleep, the words bob through the mix in random patterns, at once meaningless and rife with poignancy. Musically, the sounds drift pleasantly from new-age washes of mellow synthesizer to minimal keyboard textures, with measured notes hanging in the air to produce waves of overtones and spacey harmonies. The title track sounds like an early Eno pop experiment, but
Map Quest
Bradford Cox’s long-running side exploration errs on the side of delicacy Atlas Sound
Parallax
I
t’s always been a bit of a paradox that Bradford Cox’s
day gig, Deerhunter, doesn’t at all approximate the darkness and brutality of its filmic namesake. On the other hand, despite this project’s moniker being a type of tape player Cox once used to capture his solo and side-project work, Atlas Sound implies a certain amount of spatial calm or order amid chaos (those of you who can decipher complex maps and atlases know what we’re talking 4ad
54
magnet
most of these miniatures are cryptic combinations of words and music: sparse, mysterious and open to myriad interpretations. How much you like them will depend on how much patience you have for Eno’s high-concept approach to music making. —j. poet
Florence + The Machine
Ceremonials Universal
Bland ambition Since 2009’s breakthrough Lungs, Florence Welch has had more in common with Sarah McLachlan than kookier, pluckier predecessors Annie Lennox and Tori Amos. But the vanillaness is permissible when the music is as well executed as the Arthurian Ceremonials. Rich with orchestral rock that’s equal parts shadows and light, it perfects what has become the band’s calling card—murmurs of
about), and is quite an appropriate moniker for the dreamy, ambient pop he’s pried from his brain over the course of three albums and three years. With Parallax, Cox has created a collection of music possessing the feeling that it may collapse at any time. Whether it’s because of the fragility present in his voice and the shaky instrumentation that permits inordinate amounts of space to exist in spots where the listener craves depth and action, there’s a sense it could all come tumbling down. Gently, of course. “Mona Lisa” and “My Angel Is Broken” (on which the twangy guitar borrows from “Stand By Me”) are good examples of how to balance that delicacy with some relatively upbeat instrumentation, catchy chord progressions and memorable bouts of vocal phrasing. On the other hand, “Terra Incognita” and “The Shakes” fall apart at the behest of melodic non-sequiturs and vocals that play hide-and-seek more than they drive the song. Pace is sacrificed for space too often on Parallax, making for a lukewarm experience. —Kevin Stewart-Panko
photo by mick rock