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En, "Already Gone"
En's 2010 debut (The Absent Coast) was pretty much universally regarded as a great drone album, finding a nice balance between Stars of the Lid-style shimmering bliss and subtly harsh crackle and hiss.  Happily, their latest album repeats that formula, but takes all of their impulses a bit further: the harsh parts are harsher and the dreamy parts are even dreamier. Although it may not be not quite as uniformly solid as its predecessor, the highlights are a bit more impressive.
It is quite hard to isolate and articulate what makes Maxwell Croy and James Devane's work as En so enjoyable, as their aesthetic is superficially quite similar to that of many other artists currently making ambient drone music.  Already Gone does not boast a particularly innovative approach, clever source material, or a compelling back-story, but En simply have a distinct talent for quietly making fragile, sublime, and subtly moving music (a trait they share with the aforementioned Stars of the Lid).  I guess that should not be surprising though, as Croy has clearly spent years honing his ear for great abstract electronic music while co-running the Root Strata label.  Devane's background is a little more mysterious, as practically all I know about him is that he did a classical guitar cover of one of my favorite Aphex Twin songs ("Rhubarb").  That might not sound like much, but it instantly made me predisposed to like him.
I suppose this one of those albums where the magic lies in the details, as En make a number of minor tweaks to the expected drone tropes.  Some of them are merely curious, like the unexpectedly prominent use of recognizable rock instrumentation (a bass) or the appearance of a koto in "The Sea Saw Swell," but others are much more fundamental to Already Gone's success.  Probably the most significant is that the duo conjure up beautifully warm and shimmering beds of sustained drones, but never let them completely take over a piece's focus.  Instead, they merely provide a spacious and welcoming backdrop for a more ambitious melodic motif.
Also, much like kindred spirits Damian Valles and Marielle Jakobsons, Croy and Devane have a knack for texturally balancing their blissed-out ambiance with sharper, more organic sounds.  This is especially effective in "Marble Steppe" and the title piece, as the bowed, metallic sounds cut through the surrounding drone fog to impressively raw and emotive effect.  En display a deep and intuitive understanding of how to present their ideas so that they are affecting and meaningful without being too blunt about it, which is incredibly difficult in drone music: obvious "hooks" can be ruinous for repeat listening.
My favorite among the shorter pieces on the album is "The Sea Saw Swell," as it features a beautifully quavering motif that sounds like a processed singing saw, but a strong case could be made for most of the others as well.  All are eclipsed by album's centerpiece, however: the closing 19-minute "Elysia" is as long as the entire rest of the album combined and is essentially a highlight reel of everything En does wonderfully.
"Elysia" begins with a blurry and melancholy descending melody (accompanied by little more than field recordings of distant birds and gently lapping water) before seamlessly drifting through passages of rippling processed electric guitar, angelic ambiance, and crackling and rumbling catharsis on its way to a tenderly twinkling coda.  It is an absorbing, beautifully constructed piece from start to finish and ends the album on a very high note.  In fact, it practically is the album, as it makes the shorter, simpler pieces seem kind of like bonus tracks by comparison.  From a sequencing standpoint, I found that a little perplexing, but I like most of them enough to prefer the idea of a very good, oddly constructed album to a near-perfect one-song EP.
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