#467 Gastr del Sol - Camoufleur

Alex recommended me up a couple of his favorites.

If there's any word for this album it is unhurried. Songs unfold over time in classic Talk Talk / Stars Like Fleas / KC Accidental post-rock fashion, evoking cold, bright open spaces, repeating, evolving, meandering. Rounds ring long and clean, bereft of the kind of reverb that's in these days but rather sustained from choices involving extensive vibration. Noise creeps in, horns, pianos too, queer and unhurried like a sunny day Twin Peaks dream.

The construction is relaxing or demanding, depending on how you look at it, and undeniably arty. But the sentiment is all bare hearts, Microphones small and raw and uncertain but striving. Certainly the most crucial moment of the album is the end of the opening track. As a little scene begins, a young man's voice betrays his excitement at being in this moment and recording it: he struggles to communicate with the kids, to explain that he's recording them setting of their fireworks, but that he doesn't speak French, but that they should keep going, but no he doesn't know what time it is, and no, this is a microphone. He moves from being excited to dismayed that the moment is being ruined to convinced that it is better than ever, to frustrated at his out of placeness to frustrated at his awareness of his out of placeness and back and forth between breaths. It sums up everything about a person in love with the world and reveling just on the cusp of uncertainty, thrilled and frightened and squirming in the interactions with strangers and strangeness. That sense of discomfort, of wonder, of uncertainty follows every trembling note of the epics that follow.

I have a respect for the album, I like what it does, but for my taste its a bit too atonal, a bit too formless to make it into regular rotation. Could be a grower though 3.5/5

You might like this if: you like slow, frail music, full of uncertain pathos and flashes of beauty.