AMG Review of Pure Tone Audiometry

François Couture
All Music Guide

Pure Tone Audiometry is pure bliss. On his third album as Aarktica, Jon DeRosa hit an ingenious balance between avant-gardist guitar soundscapes, neo-folk songwriting, and post-rock dreaminess. "Out to Sea" opens the set with lush overdubbed and processed female vocals (Lorraine Lelis) over backwards guitar. Then DeRosa sings about "The Mimicry All Women Use" in a stark but ear-catching voice. The simple strummed guitar accompaniment gets a boost halfway into the track from Escapade's drummer Hadley Kahn -- at that point he should have lost the drum machine track, as the two don't always stay in sync, but that's a minor point. "Snowstorm Ruins Birthday" offers a slab of well-controlled atmospheric noise guitar before "Ocean" comes back to the indie rock ballad format. For "Big Year" and "Williamsburg Counterpoint," Aarktica turns into a real band, adding Molly Sheridan and Mahogany's Andrew Prinz on strings, bassist Ernie Adzentoivich, and the aforementioned Kahn. The former song is dark and understated, but the latter serves up a thrilling 11-minute post-rock flight replete with a slow beat and a distorted sustained guitar solo. These "band" tracks show a lot of promise, but it is their power combined to the seditious charm of the smaller-scale songs that makes Pure Tone Audiometry such a delightful album. Recommended.