So it's been awhile since I wrote anything on here, and I thought it might be fun to write some more reviews. One thing I noticed about some of the reviews that I wrote in the past is that reviewing something based on a week or two's worth of impressions isn't an especially good way to go about it. Sometimes it takes awhile for all of the strengths of an album to reveal themselves to you. As a result, you can end up, basically, being wrong, like I was about Suede's Dog Man Star, for instance, which I thought at first was just a less interesting successor to their debut. As a result, I'm going to review some albums that have had more of a chance to sink in, and in fact mean a lot to me on a personal level. For now I'm not going to rate these because I think that they're the sort of albums that, if you encounter them at the right time in your life, can be perfect tens, or may not appeal to you at all. Sometimes our tastes form at random depending on when we need a certain work of music - for me, albums like 100 Broken Windows, Dog Man Star, and Souvlaki are absolutely without question the best ever written, while the likes of OK Computer and The Suburbs don't especially appeal to me in the way they do to others. Anyway, I'm going to start with a bit of a challenge in Aereogramme's Sleep and Release. This is the band's second full album, after A Story in White, and while it abandons some elements that made A Story in White a great album, it also displays a true maturation in the band's craft.
Like their debut, Sleep and Release is an album built on shifts and contrasts. A Story in White found a lot of its impact in its juxtaposition of heavy, loud songs like "Zionist Timing" with hushed, sensitive songs like "Sunday 3:52" and "Motion." Sleep and Release follows this model to a certain extent, but in a much more ambitious that contrasts these disparate emotions within individuals songs, and with much more intense climaxes. Gone are the whispered intonations of old, as in "Sunday 3:52," where the repeated line "I demand your skin" expressed a vulnerability that was palpable to the listener. Herein continues to lie Aereogramme's greatest strength, however. The visceral qualities of their music continue to express raw emotion through sound just as much as through lyrics. This is nothing new - Aereogramme's more famous Scottish compatriots Mogwai have succeeded at this sort of thing for ages - yet Aereogramme's soundscapes impel shifts in emotion that are nearly unparalleled. This couples with lead singer Craig B's voice, at one moment a quivering falsetto, at others a rabid scream.
On Sleep and Release, the band seem to have honed the transitions between emotions, hopping from anguish to rage to confusion seamlessly and almost unnoticeably at times. This is an album that never sits still, and while this was the case with their debut - the first two minutes of "Zionist Timing" are so perfect that hearing them disappear without a trace is like heartbreak - this restlessness is perfected on their second album. "Indiscretion #243" cycles swiftly through four or five melodies before the song ends, transitioning from the compelling introductory line, "I'm listening like my father told me how to, I'm burning like my brother always knew I would," strangely echoing fellow angsty Scots The Twilight Sad's "Strong father figure with a heart of gold" and kids "on fire in the bedroom," into a hymnal chant that subsides just as swiftly. What comes next is the crushingly real "Black Path." Hardly ever has a song ever been so direct in its emotional impact, and while Aereogramme can be frustratingly grating at time, moments like these are what makes it possible to not only forgive them for these "indiscretions," but even hold them dear. I'm not sure what it is about this song that makes it cut so deep with me. Is it the melancholy, echoing bells that introduce the song? The imagery of mortality, "from green to red, black to gray"? The lyrics, all too real, that warn us about "when everyone becomes afraid of you" and to "see how pathless life can be," acknowledging just how random the events that shape our lives are, just how much it would do us good to allow ourselves to be vulnerable from time to time even if we feel compelled to put on our game-face day after day? This song hits it home in a way only Aereogramme can, somehow. I honestly don't think any music has ever been written with the emotional impact of "Black Path," "Sunday 3:52," and "Inkwell" (this last song from the band's album Seclusion). If any band could write music like this consistently, I'm not sure I could even debate about music anymore. That said, this is Aereogramme, so they move on, and so must we.
"A Simple Process of Elimination" brings one the core of the album, which is fraught with tension, confusion, and unease. Just as "Black Path" emerged from silence after the final riff of "Indiscretion #243," those sumptuous bells emerging from nothing, "A Simple Process of Elimination" is a stark diversion from its predecessor, its cold electronic clicks a shock after the decadent intimacy of "Black Path." This is a song that bring us slowly floating into the unrestrained anger of "Older," like the river in Heart of Darkness taking us ever so slowly to the horrors of the colonial Congo. The twinkling piano keys and floating plea to "erase us; erase this world" are followed by a desperate phone message, unambiguously taking a play from Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor's playbooks, and the still mysterious but slightly more active pulse of "Older," which swiftly crashes into blind, incoherent anger.
From this climax, which is basically the reason I don't offer Aereogramme as a recommendation to my friends, who would likely be a bit unnerved that I listen to music like that, "Older" fades into "No Really, Everything's Fine." This is an archetype for Aereogramme songs, a companion to the constantly shifting "Indiscretion #243" (which brings to mind the completely irrelevant Idlewild lyric "the sea's never calm. It always blows and knows it too"), with equally an equally compelling introduction to angst and a search for identity ("the reason we're all disfigured...") and a similar offer of religious imagery ("I say, 'Kingdom come'") transforming into a sorrowful admission of the hard to swallow truth: "We are all defenseless now / On your own your left somehow / With these broken bones." The musical swell as Craig B acknowledges his broken bones touches at the same nerve hit by "Black Path" before dissolving into a whirlwind of piano, guitar, and white noise before going back to the first line of the song. Ending abruptly, "No Really, Everything's Fine" is followed by "Wood," a song that shifts from a catchy introductory melody into a rage just as intense as in "Older."
This is followed, however, by the first transition into consistency of this album. Aereogramme offers us another morsel of delicious, heartfelt melody with "Yes," a beautiful, frank, and impassioned gem of a song with all of the beauty of "Black Path," but while "Black Path" feels like a delicate flower waiting to crumble, "Yes," clocking in at an unfortunately meager two minutes, because Aereogramme never lets any melody outstay its welcome, is an honest-to-god work of sensitive indie rock. Thematically, "Yes" ties this album together, lines like "shit, now you're only one hour away / Not that that matters when I couldn't stay" drawing the themes of helplessness from "Indiscretion #243," "Black Path," and "No Really, Everything's Fine," into a clarity that this album, with its foreboding instrumental interludes, has no had in any great helping up to this point. From "Yes" onward, this album shows a blunt honesty that almost borders on saccharinity compared to the riddles and metaphors that this album started with. You can almost sense this final shift in "In Gratitude" as Craig sings, "It is dangerous to put this into words, but I miss you." Yes, the raw emotion was already present in this album, but not the straightforward manner of speaking. "In Gratitude" doesn't have the punch of "Yes" - it replaces a gutsy guitar solo with a sweeping strings section and expressive imagery with straightforward statements - but it is otherwise a fine song, and by shifting one more notch toward tranquility, it brings us comfortably to "A Winter's Discord." This is perhaps the most subtle song by a band with loads of subtle songs ("Motion," "The Art of Belief," "Egypt," "Will You Still Find Me?"), and it's blink-and-you-miss-it chorus is something you need to be watching out for, but "A Winter's Discord" has plenty to offer as it lays us softly into the album's untitled closing track, a song that starts off slowly, but wakes us up again, leaving us with a violin melody that would seem at home in Game of Thrones. At the end of the day, we're left with the same sense of disorientation that we began with; fitting, as Sleep and Release lulls us once again into a false sense of security before reminding us that this album isn't easy, and isn't predictable. Indeed, Sleep and Release is a lot like life: hard at times, unbelievably rewarding at others. In the end, I suppose we must accept how "pathless life can be," as painful as the brevity of its melodies may be and as unnervingly as change may wrest us from times of comfort.
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