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MH-238 Clue To Kalo - One Way, It's Every Way  Written and recorded in Adelaide, Australia during a two-year period of great personal change, and finished on a four-month adventure in Brooklyn, USA, One Way, It's Every Way is Mark Mitchell's second record as Clue To Kalo. Designed as a musical palindrome, the album is an unabashedly ambitious, surprisingly celebratory meditation on death. Instrumental contributions from old and new friends, as well as elements of classic folk, lo-fi rock, and bedroom electronica, are all taken out of context and remade as a ten track set thick with overloaded melodies, multi-part harmonies, and literate language. One Way, It's Every Way is a stunning development for Clue To Kalo both musically and lyrically. |
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| Reviews Summary |
| A serious contender for 2005's best record - Scissorkick / Extraordinarily unassuming, gorgeous release - Stylus / A master of counterintuitive pop arrangements - Chord / Will pull at your heartstrings and carry you back to nostalgic places in the best of ways - Metro.Pop |
| Reviews | |
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| Billed somewhat confusingly as a "musical palindrome," Clue to Kalo main man Mark Mitchell writes songs that go down smoothly but which require considerable chewing to fully digest. Doing so reveals that nothing is quite as it first seems. The busy patchwork of harpsichord, toy piano, handclaps, and layered vocals makes for a dazzling arrangement in "Seconds When It's Minutes," yet the sound is almost too complex; it's difficult to pull one thread out of the whole work. Similarly, the cascading piano lines and shuffling rhythms of "The Just Is Enough" vaguely evoke the layered majesty of X/O-era Elliott Smith, even though all of the elements are blurry and poorly defined. It's only after repeated listenings that the ingeniousness of the songwriting is revealed - for example, a back-loaded hook in "The Tense Changes," or the bitter poetics of "Ignore the Forest Floor" - but it takes some work to sift through the layers of content and and apparent ordinariness of Mitchell's writing. Unfortunately, the fairly uniform textures and mid-tempo rhythms obscure how Mitchell plays with pop conventions, shifting chord changes at unexpected intervals and burying subtle melodies with smart compositional nuance. Less resilient listeners are likely to miss these details entirely. - Under the Radar |
1XLP/Out Of Print