Review by Thom Jurek
Charalambides are a whole thing. Over the past decade or so, in their incarnations as both a duo and as a trio, they have given us many recorded examples of how improvisation, dynamic, tension, and sonic inquiry are used to full genre-defying effect in creating a music that is as ghostly and strange as it is exciting. Joy Shapes is the band's first record in two years -- 2003's Unknown Spin was a re-release of a limited-edition CD-Rom, and as such, it shows a deepening and widening of their trio aesthetic. Along with Tom and Christina Carter, Heather Leigh Murray adds dimension and tonal possibility with her psaltery and pedal steel, as well as her voice. There are five tracks on Joy Shapes, and the length of the set is over 75 minutes. It is a wandering, sparely paced but very intense ride into a netherworld of sound, texture, and tone. The most striking element of the album is the new range of possibilities that Christina Carter's voice brings into play. She's taking chances, pushing her dynamic and harmonic range, and singing above the music now as opposed to being a part of it. The liner notes offer references to Patty Waters and Meredith Monk that are not inaccurate, and it would also be prudent to offer Linda Perhacs and the softer moments of Jeanne Lee. Her elliptical lyrics and jarring alto bring an entirely different set of possibilities to the fore -- especially as the interplay between psaltery and electric guitars is on "Here Not Here," and the instrumental "Stroke." The title track is perhaps the most accessible and dreamy thing here, with Murray's pedal steel slipping with a nocturnal elegance between Carter's voice and Tom Carter's hypnotic, skeletal riffing. Charalambides offer sound as an end in both composition and improvisation; they indulge it and attempt to rein it in, all the while allowing for wonderful chance occurrences of displacement, slippage, and empty space. The way the instruments begin to swirl together in a conical fashion after about five minutes is compelling in that once this contact its made, it begins to ebb and flow and undulate as it folds and glides through the mix for nearly 11 minutes. The middle section of "Natural Night," where guitars and bells roll over and under one another, is an experience akin to encountering the monster in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bette for the first time: disturbing, somewhat frightening, unsettling, but it is impossible not to listen even deeper to hear the meld of textures and tones. The set closes with "Voice for You," Ms. Carter's most stunning vocal appearance on a recording. Singing with Murray, who underscores her lines with wordless lilts and sparse syllables, the piece begins as a series of open-chorded drones that coruscate through the layered spaces, strings echoing in the silences, as voices come from the ether and caress them. Joy Shapes is easily the most intimate yet far-reaching offering yet from Charalambides. It is nocturnal, erotic, and marvelously innovative, yet remains an intimate and sublime work of the human heart, an undefinable spiritual consciousness, and of course, aesthetic ambition combined with musical vision.
Charalambides
Joy Shapes
[Kranky; 2004]
Rating: 8.6
Jesus. I didn't do this.
I'm going to have to throw this couch out. But where? How can I even ask myself something like that? Fuck, I need... I need to go out. Where are my cigarettes? I have to turn the music off. Was this going on the entire time? I can't remember playing this. Don't forget to erase the messages. Don't start crying. Come on, fuck, stand up. Pick yourself up. Did anyone hear me? He still seems awake. Maybe he is awake. Do you think he'd be mad? Should I pick him up? I have to move him and clean this room. How am I going to do that? I have to do it tonight. He would hate me if he could see this. I can't think about this now, I have to go out. Where are my cigarettes? Fuck, cats, where did you put my cigarettes? Turn the bathroom light off. Turn all of them off, don't forget. Set the alarm clock. I can't think about this right now. Don't look at him, it makes you sick. I have to write tonight.
Nothing will be open now. I can go to the field near the highway and sit down. This shirt is sweaty. I hope no one is there.
I already miss you. How are you? Where are you? Could you see me? Were you mad? I was mad, I know it. I'm sorry for everything, and I really do hate myself. I hope you know that. I think you're going to haunt me until the day I die. Listen, I have to write tonight, so I'm going to have to file you away for a while. God, we came so close. We went to the very end, and I know you didn't mean everything you said. Or maybe you did. Heh, you bleed like a motherfucker. I'm sorry, I just didn't expect it. I don't know what I expected. I have to write tonight.
Houston's premier avant-folk trio has done it again. Ack, what a terrible way to start a review-- especially for this band, for this record. Charalambides (Tom and Christina Carter, Heather Leigh Murray) have a way of making openers and brief descriptions seem worthless, like covering cakes with the bodies of grasshoppers and dead leaves. Haha, no. Like the knowledge of your own end: Whatever you might want to say about it seems overwhelmingly lacking, disrespectful. The estimable Peter Pott says any review that reveals its own uselessness is doomed from the start, yet in the case of Joy Shapes, that's entirely fitting. Its music dooms, from Tom Carter's opening three-note toll to Murray's obscene ghost-calls to a rotten garden of mutated strings and hollow bodies panging away into my blank face. I wish you could hear it. I'd love to see the faces of a million frozen capitalists (me and Bob hate you, Pitchformula) forced to listen to this, held captive in a theater a la A Clockwork Orange, with visions of their assorted ideas of a black, holy void playing before them to this music. Yeah, Charalambides have done it again, and I wish You could hear it.
What a beautiful night. All the cars passing by look like fireflies. They move by slowly and resolutely, but I can't really hear them. I can hear the grass, and I think that's a breeze. Sometimes the wind sounds like someone singing. What a stupid thing to say. I've really got to start writing greeting cards, there's probably good money in that. But it's true, sometimes the wind sounds like a fucked-up cabaret singer, just letting loose with moans and whispers like she doesn't care who hears it. Why should she care? What did Madison say? "All the bad choices ppl make for themselves come down to thinking they're a person that they're not." Maybe so. But this singing couldn't care less. It winds through desperate weeds and my hair, and would sooner level the city behind me than stop to consider who it is, why it's singing. Crazy, what music can do. How am I going to live with myself?
The droning, consonant pull of the title track doesn't so much ebb and flow as drift, always towards some pristine reservoir. I don't normally associate "bliss" with this band, and though it's unfair to assume soft, major-keyed trance necessarily equates to bliss, I fall into the trap this time. But it's a bliss that discards expected notions of peaceful resolve and acceptance; Joy Shapes plays for people who realize what terrible things they are capable of (or have already done) and are leaping hopelessly into areas of the mind safely buffered from the real world. Some people call this "transcendent." "Stroke" is similar, at least insofar as it sticks to major keys (and devilish sevenths) and gentle processions, though is wilder at heart. It has distant chimes, ringing in no obvious order or tonality, that make everything positioned on top of them seem heavenly. When the female voices enter almost seven minutes in, I struggle to compare them to anything-- maybe it's reminiscent of the last song on Vision Creation Newsun, when the savage Boredoms shed their spikes and let the blood on their teeth dry as they slept. Charalambides don't play with sharp teeth; they're wild like vines and centipedes.
Had I known you could bleed this much I might've reconsidered. But we'll see each other again. And I know I'll get everything that's coming to me. Fuck, even now, as I'm standing over you, torn and broken, you seem amazing. Did I do this? You still feel here, not here. I could never really hate you. Jesus, I didn't do this.
As Joy Shapes unwinds with a gradual, near-violent climax of howling feedback, doubled by voices disconnected from their bodies on "Voice for You", it occurs to me that these songs aren't so much hymns of passing to the other side as murder ballads. They're for murdering daydreams and the outside world; killing off connections to other music, and mental archives kept around in case you forget what "joy" and terror are supposed to feel like. I guess I should say that it's the best Charalambides album I've heard, if that makes a difference. And it's not that I think daydreams should be killed, but that some music has a way of sparking more than just your everyday escapism. That's healthy, right? Of course it is.
-Dominique Leone, July 15, 2004
|
