Pan American
The River Made No Sound
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Pan American
The River Made No Sound
Kranky, 2002
RiYL: Loscil, Oval, Pole, Labradford |
This is not bright, sunny music. It is a soundtrack to a sleepless Wednesday night: You lay in bed paralyzed with unrelenting thoughts. The red lights on your alarm clock show 2:49. It is quiet outside. The minutes flip by with cold constancy. You are alone.
Not to make an English 101 essay out of this review, but let's just squeeze some more juice out of the Hemingway comparison. His writing was succinct, direct, subtle, sober, dark, and even spooky. If you familiarize yourself with The River Made No Sound and can think of adjectives that describe the music more accurately than these, then I owe you a Twinkie.
The disc starts with "Plains," which contains some of the most bone-chilling moments of the 55-minute album. Short wisps of electronic percussion echo in the quiet background while a formidable metallic scraping comes in and out of focus. This produces a harsh feeling of emptiness that is contrasted beautifully with the warm, gentle keyboard melodies that persist throughout the track. "Plains" is the perfect intro track, enabling you to more easily get lost in the sounds that the rest of the disc has to offer.
The River Made No Sound reveals that Nelson has mastered his ability to balance soft, soothing keyboard and synth tones with more aggressive sounds. In the second track, "For A Running Dog," he uses an ungodly pound of deep bass as the backbone beat to the song and layers soft synth drones on top, creating a feeling of timelessness and leaving the listener lost in a hypnotic state. If you're already familiar with Nelson's awesome work in Labradford, this idea of hypnotizing through music should seem quite agreeable. (Isn't brainwashing through musical hypnosis a beautiful thing?)
While every track is essential to the album's ability to coax your subconscious, some of the individual standouts include the short but sweet glitch experiment "Raised Wall," "Plains," the tour of a factory given in "Settled" and the excellent closing groove of "Right of Return." Each track on this album uses only a handful of Nelson's trademark elements, creating the audio equivalent of a collection of Hemingway stories. Pan American uses an onslaught of sharp, precise details, dark tones and hidden emotions. So what does The River Made No Sound depict? Something beautiful. Something solemn. Something for you to figure out for yourself, as soon as you can.
JAKE MILHANS |