Boards Of Canada and Charalambides
by Bernardo Rondeau
Boards Of Canada
Trans Canada Highway
(Warp)
Rating: 4 out of 5 rock-ons
The elusive, tour-resistant Boards of Canada resurfaced last year with The Campfire Headphase, their third and arguably most-awaited album. Disappointing to some but surprising to few, it turned away from the dense, musty hallucinations of 2002’s Geogaddi, ditching strobed shadowplay for splendorous, natural light. The duo of Mark Sandison and Marcus Eoin seemed to strum under a cloudless sky and ghetto-blast sun-warped cassettes instead of hot-boxing in windowless, bunker-like seclusion. Their first-ever music video evinced this happy maturation: a helmeted figure plummets from the ether and transforms into a surfer cresting and crashing through azure ripples on an endless ocean. The accompaniment to these visions of paradise is the lead track on Trans Canada Highway: “Davyian Cowboy,†which can also be found on the ’05 album, as symmetrical sonically as its related film. Its first half is a slow, whirring build up of dust-clung distorted shimmer and spectral tambourine jingling that cuts to teetering tremolo chords backed by undulating rhythm clusters and CinemaScopic strings. The remaining five tracks temper the opener’s immediacy with the silence of white spaces—the disc’s artwork itself eschewing the group’s usual stain-dappled palette of faded and worn images for three-color minimalism. “Left Side Drive†evokes the numbing drift endemic in the fourth or fifth hour of a long road trip when one’s vehicle, in the absence of traffic, seemingly floats over the freeway like a vacu-sealed space capsule. “Skyliner†has more spring to its step—laser beams skitter and writhe over a motocross chug—while the Odd Nosdam remix of “Davyian Cowboy†takes the off-ramp for a quick glide on Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. Indeed, not since Ralf and Florian has both the monotony and marvel of car travel been rendered with such verisimilitude as to make the spinning record and attentive listener a viable, green alternative to actual gas guzzling behind the steering wheel.
Charalambides
A Vintage Burden
(Kranky)
Rating: 4 out of 5 rock-ons
Pared back down to its husband-and-wife core of Tom and Christina Carter, Texas’ prolific Charalambides steers its powers of communal intuition toward calm and bliss on A Vintage Burden. Born of lo-fi excursions out to the far reaches of frittered fuzz and tantric drone (see the recently reissued double-disc Our Bed Is Green) and, as of late, honing on nocturnal guitar-voice interplay via time-lapse séances—the haunting Joy Shapes—Charalambides gracefully coasts over still waters on the masterful new album. Like an opening prayer to bless the proceedings, “There Is No End†finds Christina intoning over the soft drizzle of dueling strums that diverge slightly just like her crystalline vocals split apart as two overlapped, vaporous melodies. Done with the rites of invocation, the duo then releases the healing zephyrs of “Spring†before “Dormant Love†outdoes 4AD in melding profound romanticism with an almost palpable sense of the ephemeral. The rowdier “Black Bed Blues†fissures as Tom scrawls telekinetic pathways with overheated electricity causing magnetic poles to switch and everything else to reverse. After the affecting “Two Birdsâ€â€”replete with a cosmic interlude of entwined metallic frequencies—closer “Hope Against Hope†finds Christina sounding like Azita minus the vinegar bite as she incants a final plea over pinprick tones from plucked, shuddering steel. Perhaps the best entry point for those curious on the works of Carter and Carter but beleaguered by the concept of navigating their hefty though worthwhile catalog of side projects and solo CDR’s, A Vintage Burden is also a magnificent standalone work that should rank among this year’s highlights.