This Portland, Oregon group is probably my current favorite instrumental rock act (basically ever since Battles got all goofy). I've loved all the live shows I've seen and of all their releases on Neurot, Temporary Residence, Important, and Latitude, this, their first release of 2008, is easily my top pick. Here, the group utilize their arsenal of gear and found sounds to showcase their matured compositional skills, exploit some fine riffs, and weave songs together with sounds to make a seamless and blissful 32+ minute record.
The group has been perfecting a formula since 2003: heavily influenced by Sun City Girls as well as the classic hard rock and metal forefathers yet open-minded enough to introduce samples, atmospherics, grand anthemic sounds, and non-western scales and themes into the mix. The sound is big, immense, and vast: I'm always discovering new bits and pieces I hadn't noticed before. With Take Refuge in Clean Living they not only have managed to make it all feel natural and flow amazingly well, but they have authored some of their best songs.
I get more of a feeling of Funkadelic's lengthy endeavors (songs like "Maggot Brain," "Free Your Mind,...") than any Black Sabbath tune on "Stoned at the Taj Again," as it opens with morse code, a swirling guitar melody, a wash of noises, and the audio decor of a hammer dulcimer until the drums crash in. It's a wonderful rush. Things mellow out and a sitar-mimicing guitar takes the focus until the pace picks up again before a seguay into "PTSD," a tune using a similar formula of ingredients and adding an analog synth. Here they keep the pace far more subdued, yet it's still just as sexy, with the calm of crickets leading into their creepy harpsichord-accented graveyard-esque cover of the Ventures' "11th Hour."
"Take Refuge" is a moderately-paced jam with a harpsichord drone providing the foundation for a wonderful guitar play of two guitars taking the lead while the drummer makes his presence clearly known. Focus shifts to an organ providing the drone for the second half of the tune, and while the guitars and drums back off to clear the path for it, the song never loses a beat, coming back in full force with horns, vibes, and a bass line that takes charge. "Clean Living" closes the disc out gracefully using a pretty piano melody, colored by strings, distortion, and grand echoes, making the most delicate melody on the album sound just as huge as the heavy riffage from earlier on.
It's too easy to talk about a formula; critically, however, it's difficult to describe how a song makes an impression, aesthetically. All of the music here is challenging yet captivating, skilled yet sexy, dense and rich, and while the songs are lengthy, it all goes by too quickly.
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