Monday, May 26, 2008

Atlas Sound "Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel"


Artist: Atlas Sound
Album: Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
Label: Kranky
Release date: 19 February 2008
Genre: Rock
Style: Experimental Rock/Shoegazing/Lo-Fi
RIYL: Excepter, My Bloody Valentine


Tracklisting:
01. A Ghost Story
02. Recent Bedroom
03. River Card
04. Quarantined
05. On Guard
06. Winter Vacation
07. Cold As Ice
08. Scraping Past
09. Small Horror
10. Ready, Set, Glow
11. Bite Marks
12. After Class
13. Ativan
14. Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel
Total running time: 50' 10"

[Atlas Sound - Open MySpace Standalone Music Player]

"In his day job as front man of Deerhunter, Bradford Cox exhibits a plethora of musical psyches that make for the most flabbergasting of split personalities that one band can have when speaking of the structure variety each song contains. Even though their heady brew of ethos makes for some of the most impending of avant punk, Cox has stepped aside for a second and taken up the Atlas Sound moniker on what is an ostentatious pop sojourn into his creative aesthetic. In the end, saying that he merely pushes the envelope would be an understatement.

The album is a mostly disparate concoction of wheezing drum machines and crisp layers of cinematic modulations intertwined with Cox's lethargic melodies. Cold and sweet all at once while perched atop a reef of moody Krautrock, Let the Blind Lead has a progression that melts more than it floats.

The mixing skills from Brain Foote of label mates Nudge is spot on in how the assortment of vibraphones, African bells, glockenspiels, dulcimers and metallaphones are all but vaporized with the pulp set aside so that their sounds seep out like hissing gases of Eno druthers. One could say that it's holistic when listened to from beginning to end but not in a crunchy way. Never has an artist cut something with a catatonic vibe that is all so liberating, thanks in part to Cox's dulcet vocals and smelting polyrhythms, which mostly serve as the album's core of sluggish tempos. Since time immemorial the term "ocean floor droning" has been used to coin music similar to this but Atlas Sound is a close parallel to the Blade Runner soundtrack having the artiest of indie pop scissor hand treatment being performed on it at the bottom of the Mariana Trench." [URB]

[Download.Buy]

1 comment:

Steve Engler said...

Thanks for sharing this great album, I will definitely buy it as soon as I can. Thanks to this album I also discovered how good the group Deerhunter is.