Enon - "Pigeneration" (mp3)
I've summed up my relationship with Enon's music on this blog before, including my worship of the first album Believo! and my decreasing interest in everything the band has done since Toko Yasada joined and started singing half the songs. Mostly, I didn't like the division of labor that started on High Society with John Schmersal singing all the uptempo rock songs while Yasada sang the midtempo synth pop songs, which, aside from "In This City," where pretty bland. Thankfully, that formula has been mostly abandoned on their new album Grass Geysers...Carbon Clouds (which, I should say, is both a shit title and way too similiar to their last release, the rarities compilation Lost Marbles And Exploded Evidence). I'm not going to do the creepy thing the Stylus review did and compare Yasada only to other Asian women in indie bands, but I'll just say that I'm not crazy about her icy, inexpressive vocal tone, and have a hard time makng out the words when she sings. But Schmersal and Yasada both singing on most of the songs, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes alternating through different sections of the songs, makes the new album more cohesive than the last couple, which is refreshing. But it also means that the mystery and chaos that made the band so initially exciting to listen to is gone, and more creative arrangements have been replaced by a lot of thudding bass riffs and straightforward drumming.
Grass Geysers is structurally interesting in that there's a abrupt and seemingly deliberate gap in the song lengths of the first half of the album and the second half. The shorter songs are so frontloaded that all of the first 7 songs are 3:06 or shorter, while all of the last 5 songs are 3:24 or longer. The album's sides are so sharply divided that I even noticed it during my first listen in the car, without the benefit of seeing track lengths, partly because I vastly prefer the longer, more stretched out tracks. The first song, "Mirror On You," abruptly fades out after less than 2 minutes, and most of the next few songs also rush by without leaving much of an impression. But from "Pigeneration" onward, the songs are allowed more time to breathe and feel like more than a quick verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and that one turns out to be my favorite song on the album, even with Yasada singing lead.
I've summed up my relationship with Enon's music on this blog before, including my worship of the first album Believo! and my decreasing interest in everything the band has done since Toko Yasada joined and started singing half the songs. Mostly, I didn't like the division of labor that started on High Society with John Schmersal singing all the uptempo rock songs while Yasada sang the midtempo synth pop songs, which, aside from "In This City," where pretty bland. Thankfully, that formula has been mostly abandoned on their new album Grass Geysers...Carbon Clouds (which, I should say, is both a shit title and way too similiar to their last release, the rarities compilation Lost Marbles And Exploded Evidence). I'm not going to do the creepy thing the Stylus review did and compare Yasada only to other Asian women in indie bands, but I'll just say that I'm not crazy about her icy, inexpressive vocal tone, and have a hard time makng out the words when she sings. But Schmersal and Yasada both singing on most of the songs, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes alternating through different sections of the songs, makes the new album more cohesive than the last couple, which is refreshing. But it also means that the mystery and chaos that made the band so initially exciting to listen to is gone, and more creative arrangements have been replaced by a lot of thudding bass riffs and straightforward drumming.
Grass Geysers is structurally interesting in that there's a abrupt and seemingly deliberate gap in the song lengths of the first half of the album and the second half. The shorter songs are so frontloaded that all of the first 7 songs are 3:06 or shorter, while all of the last 5 songs are 3:24 or longer. The album's sides are so sharply divided that I even noticed it during my first listen in the car, without the benefit of seeing track lengths, partly because I vastly prefer the longer, more stretched out tracks. The first song, "Mirror On You," abruptly fades out after less than 2 minutes, and most of the next few songs also rush by without leaving much of an impression. But from "Pigeneration" onward, the songs are allowed more time to breathe and feel like more than a quick verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and that one turns out to be my favorite song on the album, even with Yasada singing lead.
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on Saturday, October 27, 2007 at 12:31 PM.
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