#151 Grasscut - 1 Inch / 1/2 Mile

Read about this on Dusted, listened to the sample track about 3 times, was intrigued, was looking forward to hearing this.

This album kind of blows me away. It's electronic pop, but it's more accurately super brokedown, truly experimental, utterly otherworldly, occasionally gorgeous barely-pop. Some of the more rock-oriented songs sound like Menomena, and toy with beats and patterns in a similar ways. But other songs sound more like glitch, or fine-grained cut-and-paste composition on the order of The Books. And I know I use M83 as a reference point far too often, but some of these songs evoke that band's bigger-than-the-sky grandeur. Actually, the songs all sound very different from eachother, but there's still a thread running through them; it's like tripping through different dimensions with the same partner. In that way, it kind reminds me of The Olivia Tremor Control's psychedelic masterpieces of place.

Grasscut is apparently a collaboration between a film and television composer and his bass player buddy, which explains 1 Inch / 1/2 Mile's evocative expertise, but there's enough catchy pop moments to keep it give it form, and to keep it from being background music. It's a contradiction of strangeness and listenability.

Its other contradiction is the fact that this sounds very modern, in the sense that it is highly experimental and electronic, but it also sounds impossibly old. Tracks like 1946 and the crushing closer In Her Pride crack with tape hiss, croak with aged voices, creak with accents from old worlds, and are filled with rushing sound like time itself. The Tin Man gives me a chill, listen to it with headphones. Really, listen to all these songs with headphones.

This is an exciting album that I can barely get my head around. I'm excited about it the way I was when I first heard Who Will Cut our Hair When We're Gone, Kid A and Night Ripper, and those are 3 of my 4 favorite albums of the last decade. Now, it won't live up to those credentials, and maybe it won't hold up at all to repeated listens, but it sounds so original, so not-quite-like-anything-I've-ever-heard, and I feel like that never happens to me anymore. On a blog dedicated to first impressions, this is an easy 5/5