Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: emusic.com, high places, lucky dragons, reviews, thrill jockey
Please excuse my terrible pun. I still haven’t gotten the hang of witty post titles. Anyway, this post will be infinitely more relevant come September, when Brooklyn’s High Places release their first, self-titled LP on Thrill Jockey. The band has an compilation of EP’s released in 2007 fittingly titled 3/07-7/07. It had previously been released on a new independent artist service on emusic.com, but Thrill Jockey is pressing and re-releasing the album for the iTunes crowd and beyond.
I’ve had 3/07-7/07 for a few months now and it’s the type of album that I enjoy in cycles. At first, it was a pretty fresh sound, certainly being unique and interesting to listen to. But then I thought to myself, who actually listens to this stuff? Songs literally bubble up, noises fade in and then everything immediately fades out. Most of the time, it sounds like children’s music. This fact certainly is not helped by Mary Pearson’s feint, girly vocals.
Now I’ve come to realize that this is precisely what makes High Places appealing. Songs grow into one another allowing for the entire album to have an organic feel. Listening to it seems like you are experiencing a living, breathing organism. I can best compare the music to a group like Lucky Dragons, who share the notion that music should be organic, not something mathematically constructed. Bells, woodwinds, chimes and wooden percussion are all fair game, and the amount of melody that can be generated from these instruments by two people is impressive. While many of the instruments are actually electrical or computer generated, High Places definitely extracts the living spirit from them.
