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Experimental Aircraft, "Third Transmission: Meet Me on Echo Echo Terrace"
This is only the third album in eleven years from Austin's Experimental Aircraft, after 1999’s self titled debut on Sleepy Bunny (and which was subsequently re-released a year later by Devil in the Woods Records) and Love for the Last Time (Rollerderby) in 2002. Here, once again, the Texas quartet engineer a collection of hazy and melodically high flying, brightly-lit guitar-based indie-rock songs, aided and lifted in the main by Rachel Staggs’ (Eau Claire, Static Silence) warm yet slightly distant voice (but which is yet shot through with a steely strength even so) which floats serenely above a landscape of strong noisy reverb-soaked guitar lines backed by a dependably solid rhythm section.
The principal attribute on show here is—given that each separate element displays a certain simplicity of construction in musical terms, together in the round they combine to create a complex density—a thick patterned sonic carpet full of sculpted depth and shapes. Dark swathes of distorted guitar provide a solid canvas on which sparkling melodies and highlights find themselves picked out, and both the sweetly distracted vocals of Staggs and the more straightforwardly sung delivery of T.J. O’Leary find a springboard from which to launch themselves. More than that though is that that canvas is an expansive one, whose musical and stylistic horizons stretch as far as the eye can see, describing vast limitless soundscapes upon which are drawn the small orbits of the everyday it seems. It’s this aspect of the small painted against the larger backdrop that drives the engine of this album, and for me the brightest sparks come from the friction between the echoey and reverb-sodden guitars, and the borderline ethereality and fragility of Stagg’s vocal lines, which give the impression of a tiny lost point within a much greater space, almost on the verge of being overpowered and being dispersed to the four winds but yet having a hidden steeliness and strength that enables it to both remain whole and be greater than the limits imposed on it.
This is not to say that O’Leary’s voice is lacking in effectiveness, simply that his strengths have a different focus and aims to fill the space it occupies, refusing to let what surrounds it subsume or absorb it in any way. In some ways it’s an act of defiance; in other words, even amongst the vastness, I refuse to be lost and I am a voice that deserves to be heard and listened to. The backing music is equally adept and flexible at creating a supporting framework upon which to hang the two vocal styles, and very often the music is designed to complement whoever’s singing and does so excellently. It is clear, then, that all of the musicians work as a successfully harmonious unit, able to draw out the relative strengths of each, polishing and illuminating them; moreover this particular facet positively shines through, blindingly so I would say.
As a collection of songs melody- and beat-driven songs this has few, if any, faults—however I do have one issue with this CD, and that’s the cover that graces it. Quite simply put it looks like it’s the result of no more than ten minutes work when they discovered that in the euphoria of putting this together they’d actually forgotten to commission an artist to create one. It’s nothing more than a quickly cobbled together Photoshop exercise—in fact I recognised some of the effects used from my time as a designer getting to grips with the new graphics technology in the early '90s, and in these days of sophistication and polish there is absolutely no excuse for producing such a shoddily packaged product.
Just look past that, though, and there is a wealth of texture, emotional range, and musical prowess to please, and certainly from my point of view, it ticks all the boxes: it is melodically sophisticated and mature, with a group of excellent musicians who play to each other’s strengths and abilities, resulting in a coherent package that is confidently delivered and played. That, to all intents and purposes, is what does it for me on this one.
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