| The nerve, the sheer nerve of Clue to Kalo's Mark Mitchell: how can you expect to combine My Bloody Valentine, Boards of Canada and the Dream Academy and come away with anything but a soft-focus, fuzzy-headed mess? More to the point, kid, how did you channel them into such an accomplished, consistently strong album? Come Here When You Sleepwalk is a departure for Mush, a label best known for the surrealist alt-rap. Then again, one of Mush's biggest successes to date has been cLOUDDEAD, a CD that shares a spacey, lysergic dreaminess with much latter-day electronica, Mitchell's work included. But while Mitchell may be an Autechre aficionado, his songwriting has deeper roots in the shoegazer scene of My Bloody Valentine and Flying Saucer Attack, who refined the art of writing simple, pastoral lullabies and wrapping them in avant-garde, aural-illusory production tricks. The real trick, then as now, is making sure that the wrapping complements the tune rather than disguising the lack thereof. It's a trick that Mitchell is still practicing. He does an impressive job of alternating between beatier IDM instrumentals and folksier vocal tracks, changing up a rhythm when things get too static or dropping it out entirely for a more intimate effect. It's not an edge-of-your-seat experience, but a finely controlled meander; these songs rarely end under the five-minute mark, and often go through several distinct metamorphoses before they fade into the ether. The first vocal track, "Empty Save the Oxygen," begins with a looped acoustic guitar over which Mitchell breathily mumbles his forlorn lyrics like an electro-acoustic Nick Drake: "I'd like to love you / but I'd like a lot of things." Elsewhere, "This Dies Over Distance" feels like one of Aphex Twin's most spectral ambient pieces married to the most mournful indie-rock, its emotional punch inversely proportional to its forcefulness. At its best, as with Mileece's recent Formations, the music feels almost grown, a living organic structure swaying in the breeze. By the same token, there are times when the beats - often the central aspect of a modern electronic album - feel like an afterthought. As intricate and immaculate as Mitchell's rhythm programming is, with few exceptions the beats don't propel the songs forward as much as they pulse below the surface like a filigreed metronome. The album-closer, "Do You Know That Love Can End', could easily be a downtempo remix of Ride's 'Nowhere' album, Mitchell's thin but pretty vocals cocooned in gentle strings and buoyed by a simple, effective hip-hop beat. It's undeniably lovely, but it's a little enervating as well. Compared to similar but more extroverted acts like Capitol K and Manitoba, Clue to Kalo lacks the jagged pop edges that stick in the listener's memory. One hopes Mitchell will continue to hone his songcraft and write tunes that do more than swell and recede in relation to their contents. Until the next album, though, serene pseudo-organic beauty will do nicely. - Splendid |
2XLP/Out Of Print