![cover image](/brain/images/yellow_swans-going_places.jpg)
Going Places commences in a very promising way, with the blackened, crackling ambience of “Foiled.” The piece is built upon a simple, murkily haunting melodic figure that likely emanates from a treated guitar, but it is buffeted with a volcanic cascade of dense white noise, strangled feedback, and rumbling. It sounds simultaneously massive and ruined, like a Brian Eno song that is being devoured by a swarm of metallic insects while a fire blazes out of control. Such a thing is not completely without precedent, as it treads similar territory to Tim Hecker or Peter Rehberg, but it is pulled off extremely well.
The lengthier piece that follows (“Opt Out”) remains in a similar, but more muted, vein. The subdued white noise still makes it sound like the somber droning is emerging from an inferno, but the sound expands a bit with subtle psychedelic elements like echoing shudders and scraps and something that approximates a gentle kalimba. The washes of static and mangled guitars cohere into a hypnotically rippling pulse for much of the piece’s build up, but that subtle rhythm is gradually buried beneath a dense white noise avalanche as it glacially culminates. Notably, the music never sounds harsh, despite the fact that violently unmusical noises are occurring fairly constantly. This is largely due to the album’s production, which is heavily compressed. While this certainly sacrifices some definition and edginess, it ultimately proves to have been a very good idea, giving the album a shadowy, drugged atmosphere that is easy to get enveloped in.
Of course, that homogenizing fogginess also means the songs all blur together a bit. While that does not necessarily mean that the rest of the album yields diminishing returns, it does feel more like one very long, subtly evolving piece than six unique, differentiated works. There are minor variations, of course, but the distant, slow-moving drones and the patina of artfully constrained electronic noise chaos remain both constant and central. The duo departs from the formula slightly with some vocal howls in the more cathartic closer (“Going Places”), but more textural range would have been a welcome addition to the album. Going Places is a very formidable, listenable, and thematically coherent swansong, but I suspect Peter Swanson and Gabriel Mindel may have called it quits before quite reaching their peak.
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