High Places – Review
Sometimes the cold metallic sheen of the loop-based, electronic and beat-laden can be a little too sophisticated in its modernity to transcend its exclusivity to the dance faction, which is a shame, because often the loop-based, electronic and beat laden can be fairly warm and inclusive, without sounding like a field recording of a toolbox being fed into a washing machine. High Places use an emptied-cutlery-draw-falling-onto-steel-drums kind of percussion, alongside what sometimes sounds like old arcade machines parping in the background, but the organic and human elements of this debut eclipse any consideration of this Brooklyn duo working in a musical ghetto branded with the simplistic “Intelligent Dance Music” acronym.
Clunky bone rattling rhythms stumble forward like the natural sound of objects being hit and Mary Pearson’s wispy vocals, which barely surpass the ethereal or the monotone, combine to present the homemade quality of an album given the “made at home” epithet. Beneath the musical veneer the lyrical content also unveils a literal organic concept, dealing with the wonder of participating in nature and the impact of an inner imagined, or outer natural world. The songs, whether they address the joy of climbing trees or just the beauty of them dressed in lights, convey a sense of childlike awe, which also seems to suit the timid vocal delivery. Similarly, the tinkling electronics, concocted by multi-instrumentalist Rob Barber, patter away like the distant memory of a noisy music lesson at a nursery, as the convoluted clank of (what sounds like) wood and metal jostles among the artificial and the processed.
At times, the tangled tintinnabulations of the individual tracks saturate the album in a crowded and indistinguishable rhythms and the furnishing of an abrasive pulse with a fragile voice is an especially well-oiled mechanism in dance music, but there are enough captivating moments to distract the listener from an over familiar modus operandi. The galvanising momentum of “Namer”, the pleasing eastern twang of “The Storm” and the exquisite atmospherics of “From Stardust to Sentience” all proffer a repeated pressing of the repeat button, as does the chanting cadence of “Gold Coin” in its gleeful revolutions.
Although not strictly their first official release of note (there’s the 03/07 – 09/07 collection of singles and stray tracks) this self-titled “proper” album manages to meld the subject of unselfconscious wonderment to the object of the mechanics of the machine-based, with results that are far from cold, inhuman or exclusive.
High Places – The Storm
High Places – From Stardust To Sentience
Tags: album
