#384 Washed Out - Within and Without

Brit'd! Well, partially. Several people have mentioned these guys lately, and they got fork'd pretty good, so I guess I'd better keep up. Recovering, recovering, cred returning, if slowly.

This treads some pretty well-traveled ground, wallowing in the kind of reverb-drenched, near-ambient, minimally-beated emotional soakins that are popular these days, sounding most obviously like Cut Copy (who they're sharing a stage with soon, I hear!) in their echoing-off-the-stars night-lasting-forever sentimentality.

Which is a backhanded assessment that's not inaccurate, but not really very fair. There's more here. For one, the production here is pretty darn brilliant, with plenty of tones, bleeps, surges, basslines and drums that are fraught with nuance and perfectly balanced. Listen to Far Away's Ratatat surges, crisp rattle skitches, nuanced bass, rumbling strings, perfectly honed thump thumps - whatever this scene's tricks are, these guys are performing them far better than is strictly necessary.

There are other details that elevate this too, most notably on Before, where a single, clipped, broken, incomprehensible vocal sample, repeated again and again builds an unbelievable amount of tension that the rest of the song strives (not altogether successfully) to sooth with synths. It reminds me quite a lot of early M83, America in particular, where fragments go by and flick your brainstem near-subliminally.

One last thing I appreciate is the album's brisk pacing, done in 40 minutes. It makes an otherwise overbearing experience a bit more precious, and inspires repeated listenings, and therefore the kind of track-level repetition needed to get music like this properly scratched into your soul. It's something few bands outside of Radiohead have figured out: shorter albums are sometimes better. Let a gesture be the size it naturally should be, it doesn't need to bloat to fit your concept of a 55 minute masterstroke.

I don't think this is quite my scene, but what it does, it does admirably enough to earn my respect and my interest 4/5

You might like this if: you want to hear synths upon synths upon samples upon samples, perfectly balanced, that will make you long, even if you don't know quite what for.