Albums by this artist

Blankets (2005)

Tracker

Blankets

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» JEFF GRAY | STAFF WRITER

Tracker Blankets Film Guerrero, 2005 RiYL: Tortoise, Japancakes, Yat-Kha

Blankets is perhaps the finest soundtrack to a graphic novel ever produced. Tracker’s third album, it’s inspired and commissioned -- even if the commission predates the inspiration -- by Craig Thompson’s immensely successful work of the same name, a six-hundred page illustrated opus about an unlikely and hopeless first love. The drawings in Thompson’s book are simple and clean, and though he touches on his subjects -- among them Christianity, child abuse, and divorce -- with uneven sophistication, he captures the glory of first love with a quiet simplicity that’s unmatched by few artists in any genre.

Tracker’s album is a fitting accompaniment. It’s perhaps more a score than a soundtrack; there are no hit singles with corporate tie-ins here, no songs tailored and timed to run over the closing credits of a feel-good blockbuster. It’s largely instrumental, all muted guitars and rumbling bass drums. Blankets the book takes place across several Wisconsin and Michigan winters, and it’s stuffed with images of snow, quilts, and icy breath. The album seizes upon the same wintry imagery, most obviously with song titles like “The Flurry,” “Snow,” and “Stirring Furnace,” but also with a spare tone and icily distant keyboards and winds. Blankets is music fit for wandering into a snowstorm at night.

For all its muted serenity, though, Blankets is neither depressing nor tiresome. It is an excellent record, the result of deft songwriting and defter playing by composer John Askew and a handful of other musicians. It does not tell a story itself (it leaves that to the book, though you don’t need the book to like the album) but it is extraordinarily good at setting a mood. The first track, in fact, only takes a few seconds to transport you to its winter non-wonderland.

That song, “(We Were) The Trees,” is a sort of overture. It doesn’t have a memorable melody so much as it builds up a frosty ambience. Lest the listener get too restless waiting for something to happen, the next song, “The Flurry (pt 1),” is as close in structure to a pop song as any other instrumental on the album. The entire record handles the balance between mood and action with great skill. “Marathon,” for example, a one-minute interlude between two slow and foreboding tracks, brilliantly shakes things up. It’s full of alarm bells and a groove that, were it revved up just a bit faster, might not seem out of place on a hip-hop record. Blankets isn’t intended to be music to motivate you through your workout, but neither does it need to be relegated to nap-time background music.

At the end, Askew throws in a surprise: singing, on “Everything Is Beautiful,” a minor-key acoustic ballad. It’s exactly the right kind of ending, a bridge from the muffled whispers of the rest of the album back to the real world. Its title is repeated as the song fades out, but the message is more bittersweet than optimistic, swallowed as it is by muted horns and drums. Still, there’s nothing ironic in Tracker’s juxtaposition of beauty and sadness. It’s that very lack of irony that makes Blankets, both book and record, so appealing. Stories of first love may be trite and clichéd, and no one’s claiming there’s a global shortage of moody instrumental music, but any art that can expose a raw vein of honest emotion is welcome.

JEFF GRAY | Jeff Gray used to be an important mover and shaker in Chicago, but gave all that up to live on a beach in rural Hawaii. You'll notice him if you're there, he's the one who's very tall and a little bit sunburned. His musical tastes tend towards the mainstream -- Phish, Radiohead, The Strokes -- but he'll argue to the death that those bands are mainstream because they're 100% awesome. Jeff's always on the lookout for the next great pop song, tidbits about Michigan football, and 80's action movies on cable.