Gravenhurst "The Western Lands"
-
Artist:
-
Album:
-
Track:
I put up the video to "Trust" off this really excellent album a couple of weeks ago, so this time around, I'm sharing one of the more rocking songs on the CD on my music page. It's really for Dale, because I know he'll go for anything that sounds like My Bloody Valentine, but the rest of you are welcome to it as well. (I still haven't decided how I feel about the long feedbacky breakdown...what do you guys think?) The record is out on Warp (http://www.warprecords.com) just about now, and looks to me like it's a shoo-in for top 25, though probably not top 10. Anyway, here's my review, which went up at PopMatters yesterday. Luminous guitars, unsettling atmospheres ...The video for “Trust”, the first single off Gravenhurst’s fifth full-length album is rather wonderful, its flickering, gray-toned animations evoking a world that is both nightmarish and strangely beautiful, industrial and yet fancifully dreamlike. You could hardly capture the song any better than the video has, with its odd, contradictory measures of cool balladry and uneasy lyrical contents. It’s the kind of song you can imagine people slow-dancing to, absorbing only its yearning, romantic tone, and ignoring its more difficult imagery. “Trust is a hard thing to come by/These days” indeed. “Trust” is the best song on The Western Lands, or at least the most marketable and easiest to absorb. However, it stands out only by a small margin from an album that works best as a whole, its MBV-ish drones melting into near folky ballads and everywhere Talbot’s luminous, three-dimensional guitar lines hanging mysteriously in the atmosphere. (There's more here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/reviews/47645/gravenhurst-the-western-lands/)
Comments (5)