Rapid Fire Reviews: Difficult To Define with Colin Stetson, Arooj Aftab, Midwife/Vyva Melinkolya & Sufjan Stevens
Probably my last rapid fire for a while with a lot of great new music coming out, maybe.
Love In Exile - Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily
Even though I was late to formally cover the album, I really enjoyed Arooj Aftab's 2021 breakout Vulture Prince and I was really looking forward to how she was going to follow it up. What I didn't expect, though I maybe should have, is this trio of veteran musicians linking up for a deeply compelling explorative jazz record. The group take a pretty sparse approach to filling in the cracks with their sound, serving up just vocals, keys, and bass with almost no studio interference to their original live recordings. The record is also thematically sparse with compositions built around short lines of poetry often repeated throughout and expanded upon through the developing instrumentation. Take the opening track To Remain/To Return whose vocal diatribes often take a backseat to long wanderings on the piano only to return at surprising moments to split the sound with Aftab's striking melodies. All six of these compositions push past 8 minutes and normally because there's very little sense of urgency to be found. Yet despite how stark the assembled pieces add up to be the record almost never lacks interest. After a long but rewarding instrumental intro, Haseen Thi starts to really hit its groove around 5 minutes in when the playful keys slice into the mix and Aftab lets her swelling vocal harmonies begin to wander even more. Memorable moments like that are the definitive takeaway from the record but they're made extra satisfying by the quiet and gentle builds often taken to get there. Another point comes on the second-half climax of the record's shortest track Sanji
The record's defining track Shadow Forces is packed full of these moments. It's the song that most feels like it's existing within a physical live space as increasingly intense keys flood in from one side of the mix and the dynamic poetic repetition soars in after it. The song is a completely self-contained epic right in the record's midpoint and it's been the track I most return to on its own since first hearing the full album. By comparison, Eyes Of The Endless is the record's eeriest moment and that often uncomfortable space never really goes away as the track morphs through its composition. Despite the record's limitations being self-imposed it would still be disingenuous to pretend that every moment of the album feels exactly as essential as everything else and there are occasionally times when it lulls. But despite those moments, I came away from the project both excited by what it offered and hoping to further engage with the material and the artists who created it in the future. 7.5/10
Reflections - Sufjan Stevens, Timo Andres, Conor Hanick
For every Sufjan album in more conventional form, he drops three side projects or indulgences into something else entirely different. Normally I tend to pay attention to these more than I would for other artist's side projects as I've enjoyed some of them quite a bit, most notably 2017's Planetarium collaboration. While Reflections may not be his first foray into composing in a classical sense, it is his most direct. The project is a pretty straightforward collection of classical piano pieces which drift often through rousing opening notes into often playful compositional push and pull. None of the compositions here stretch beyond 7 minutes and the record itself wraps up at a clean half an hour which I think is the right idea. Throughout this album, Sufjan pulls the technically impressive instrumental passages right to the forefront and normally foregoes much of the build you would normally take to get there.
The only thorough and major complaint I have with the project is the recording style which is wonderfully impressive during the project's jittery moments of flexing technicality but falls far short of effectively capturing it at its loudest and most dramatic. It's another reason I have an issue with many of the songs starting off with near-deafening slamming of keys as it never translates well from what came before. For this reason, I think some of the more melancholic and sonically expansive tracks in the second half are better than the more rousing moments on the first and the record grew on me with consecutive listens once I realized that. I'm not sure Reflections is a must-hear for anyone, even Sufjan die-hards. But for those that have wanted to get into classical arrangements, this presents a bitesize indulgence from a familiar name that certainly has its moments. 6/10
When We Were That What Wept From The Sea - Colin Stetson
Of all the albums in this rapid-fire, this was the one I was most excited for because Colin almost always delivers. Whether it's with a soundtrack that fits whatever it's attached to with eerie perfection or an album whose uniquely experimental elements seem to perfectly suit whatever the core concept is on each project, Colin is just one of the most consistently wonderful musicians working today. Though he released an interesting and underrated saxophone drone album last year, Wept is Colin's first conventional solo album in 6 years ad I was very excited to see what his inspiration was to return to the format. Some of that could be found in the record's title track and only single which feels like classic Colin saxophone soloing but with a bit of a shimmer that hasn't always been there, particularly among his darker releases. The best vision into what the record's intentions are comes on the five-part The Lighthouse series which is sprinkled throughout. It contains the record's only features through bagpipe and spoken word additions as well as a poem that seems to serve as the primary thematic thread connecting the album's sonic motifs to a narrative or idea.
Unlike on Sufjan's album though, I think the recording style is massively supplemental to the compositions and performance here. Take a song like Infliction whose playful sax diatribes are incredibly fun but also have a sense of weight and dynamism added to them through the intimacy of the recording which makes it sound like Colin is breathing right into your ear. The combination of that breathing with some vocal melodies on One Day In The Sun is another great example of additions that go a long way. Later on the record are highlights like Writhen which plays heavy-handedly into Colin's new job of soundtracking sped-up animal videos on TikTok. If it's not clear I like this record a lot though it isn't necessarily perfect. My main issue is with some of the shorter tracks, which can occasionally be great experiments but sometimes also fail to justify their place in the tracklist. That tracklist also sometimes doesn't do itself any favors occasionally splicing moments that suck the energy out after a few great highlights in a row. Overall I think this is a wonderful return from Colin though, an album that lives up to his promise of relentless buzzing solo sax outings and also provides a number of worthwhile and creative expansions of that core promise along the way. Despite how prolific Colin has become he still feels far from short on ideas and this consistently impressive album is proof. 8/10
Orbweaving - Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya
This is a new collaborative project released on The Flenser from two artists who are hard to describe in their own right. Midwife has most commonly come to be described as a slowcore outfit which it certainly is, but it also interpolates some heavier sounds of metal and drone as well as some lighter ones like dream-pop. Vyva on the other hand tends to adhere to a more pure vision of shoegaze, though even that isn't easy to pin down as like much of the genre today there are slices of styles like dream pop worked in throughout. Even though I've never covered either artist's music in full before I've been paying attention to both projects for a while now and I was pretty excited to see them crossover here. Their collaborative record is just over 5 tracks though it stretches out beyond half an hour and features a lot of the same genre labels that I've already tried to apply to both artists in this intro.
Among the three shorter tracks is Miss America, the opener and a full embrace of slowcore composition with breathy vocals embracing isolation in a darkened world of being a "Miss America." It's a strong start to the record though I can't say I enjoy Hounds Of Heaven quite as much. There is some compelling soundplay to be found here but I don't think the refrains or distorted riffs are nearly exciting enough to carry the song for as long as they're expected to. The more gentle application of distortion on Plague X definitely results in a better sound and a much more satisfying conclusion with the louder riffs slide into the song on the second half. On the longer side of things, there's NMP which stands for "No More Pain" and clocks in at just under 8 minutes. The track has a long opening crawl pairing nostalgic Duster-esque guitar tones with sweet but obscured vocal refrains which makes for a pretty compelling sound. Strangely enough, the track becomes less effective for me when the full body of instrumentation comes in as the slow bumbling drums seem to take away more of the song's impact than they add. The monumental closer and title track takes up more than a third of the record on its own and uses that time to serve up a long instrumental piece. It's a sweeping ambient piece that I sort of always expected to eventually become a familiar Midwife drone, but it stays pretty firmly in the realm of dark ambient. I like what it has to offer quite a bit and it makes good use of its runtime, even if taking up this much time on the album with an ambient finale feels like a bit of a strange choice. I'm not sure Orbweaving is the best way to be introduced to either artist involved, but if you're already familiar with their work or you like to live in the margins of dark slowcore then it's definitely worth checking out. There are concepts here I could really see myself enjoying if they're expanded upon, but even as a proof of concept, there's plenty of interesting things going on with Orbweaving. 6.5/10
