On their debut full-length, this NY-based quintet have demonstrated their penchant for the electro organic; seamlessly blending the sharp and gentle, like a chain gang draped in organza. Think Can or Faust all mashed up with the personal disco of Arthur Russell. Think of the electric organ of Terry Riley's "Shri Camel", slowly morphing and perpetually in motion, but remaining in step with a guitar-less and Moroder-charged Sparks. And think of a more composed Dead C, where Michael Morley sings about Big Thunder Mountain while holding a beach ball in one hand and fending off the digital shards of musique concrète humming around his ears with the other.
Alex Delivery
Star Destroyer
[Jagjaguwar; 2007]
Rating: 6.7
We live in a world where mp3s, guitar tabs, and concert videos are more accessible to a greater number of people than ever. Therefore, when Indie Band X drops a debut album stylistically stitching together, say, Italian disco and early Modest Mouse, the accomplishment's somewhat demystified by the insane amount of exposure we all enjoy in the Information Age. Despite this phenomenon, Brooklyn's Alex Delivery sounds intent on blowing your mind on their expansive and ambitious debut, even if you're familiar with all their go-to tools and tricks.
In many ways, Star Destroyer sounds like prog tailored for a hipster audience that hates nearly everything prog's about (dramatic climaxes, technical proficiency, rich instrumentation), though likes having several chic genres crammed down their throat on nine minute-plus tracks. Furthermore, many of these songs contain a strange blend of aestheticism and ascetism, whether by preemptively deflating a potentially epic melody or shaving down noisy krautrock into harmless laptop pop. Catchy opener "Komad", for example, initially extends Sebadoh's lo-fi pop to the same cacophonous degree as Iran's Moon Boys, though midway through transmogrifies into a space-age motorik freakout, its mechanical synths and beeps starkly contrasting frontman Robert Lombardo's all-too-human vocals.
Star Destroyer may be a pretty opaque record, particularly on first listen, but its brief flashes of hooks often shine through the murky krautrock and shoegaze. The mild pretentiousness of "Komad" comes down to earth on "Rainbows", the following track. Canned strings and soothing keyboards compliment Lombardo's serene vocals, unlike other passages on the album where feedback squalls and jarring percussion poke holes in the leading melody. At just over two minutes, "Scotty" feels like an insignificant blip sandwiched between two behemoth tracks, though the track's goofy carnival feel provides a much-needed break from the plodding stoicism of Star Destroyer's longer songs.
The drastic shift from tight and catchy to protracted and cerebral is easily Star Destroyer's most frustrating characteristic. While the binary works on a song like "Komad", other lengthy tracks like "Sheath-Wet" and "Milan" fail to create stylistically disparate sections that are equally interesting, degenerating instead into repetitive jams that never quite jell. This is not a plea for catchier songs, either, but rather for more ear-grabbing ideas that can unfold over a nine-minute track coherently. Thankfully, these guys show a glimpse of that promise with closer "Vesna", an intergalactic ballad reminiscent of David Bowie's Berlin albums. As their gorgeous impressionistic album art indicates, Alex Delivery loves revealing pretty ideas at obtuse angles, always wary of cheapening their songs with direct, straightforward hooks. Even more promising, they clearly have the encyclopedic musical knowledge and sonic mastery to craft an album that both borrows from their influences and puts a unique, innovative spin on them. For now, however, Alex Delivery's got a bit of a mad scientist streak, still searching for some method to their madness.
-Adam Moerder, May 07, 2007
While listening to “Komad,” the nine-minute suite that opens Alex Delivery’s debut album, Star Destroyer, I can’t help but be reminded of the grandiose, if not creatively corpulent, “kitchen sink” experiments that informed the infant Boces days of Mercury Rev. Save Nik Bozic’s bleary-eyed bellow, which is strikingly reminiscient of Dave Barker’s (the Rev’s original ringleader), there’s nothing tonally on “Komad” that is remotely similar; no woodwinds or brass, no jazz-tinged fits or miniature choirs. Instead their link lies in Alex Delivery’s ability to harness the periphery, the out-of-bounds clicks and echoes, clang and din, and either find a welcome place for it within the song, or follow it directly towards uncharted pathways.
In lesser hands, such corralling of both chaos and comfort, can seem excessive or pretentious (even for groups as universally lauded as Mercury Rev), but on Star Destroyer every external distortion, found sound, and brief excursion is lovingly forced to be an integral part of the overall framework. It’s an album suited more for headphones than hi-fis—otherwise you might miss the faint field recording of a bus making its routine stop, bottles breaking on concrete, or birds chirping in the distance.
The Star Destroyer is as much an extra-terrestrial warcraft as it is a horse-drawn gypsy caravan, both vehicles equipped with expansive satellites able to transmit each other’s black box to the world in tandem. It’s an album that constantly travels an oblique roadmap, simultaneously welding robotic assembly lines to the tent revivals found along dirt roads and all points in between. “Milan” takes a journey through celestial ambience, a ride down Cluster’s fluorescent autobahn, back to the post-rock, sepia-toned plateaus of an empty desert, and finally touches down on an overgrown jungle in which an orchestra plays to the moonlight that pokes through the canopy.
That perpetual motion, through landscapes once remembered and astral realms undiscovered, gets repeated on “Sheath-Wet,” with both earthen tones and metallic buzz running parallel with one another, fighting for attention. Many times though there’s too much conflict between the elegant and the grotesque, as on “Scotty,” one of the album’s shorter sour notes, where under the surface the band plays a haunting carnival waltz with music box whimsy, only to be completely obscured by a brooding industrial march. Or on “Rainbows,” another brief song that almost succeeds as a heart-stung ballad of twilight twang—until it’s riddled by what sounds like a swarm of locusts hovering over the campfire, eventually devouring the song.
While I’m inclined to side with any outfit that can seamlessly thread the warehouse scrap of krautrock with weightless shoegaze, damaged folk, and bright synthetic propulsions, the effort required to imagine Star Destroyer as something more than faceless psychedelic imitation is tiring. Huge aspirations and sprawling attempts at recording every crackle in the universe are euphoric upon first listen, but it’s a feat not suited for the timid. After all, it did take Mercury Rev three tries to finally get it right. Surely Alex Delivery has plenty of time to one day find that happy medium.
Reviewed by: Kevin J. Elliott
This new release from the always-worth-a-listen Jagjaguwar label is a curious little thing indeed. It's packed full of fractured beats and trickling melodies that all struggle to be heard amid the ever-present fog of noise that make up this intriguing collection of songs. New York's Alex Delivery have here a fuzzy blend of prog rock, Krautrock and Brighton rock mixing spacey distortion with deafening drums, mumbled vocals and delicate melodies that seem to emerge from disused seaside piers or children's playgrounds.
Self-sabotage is also a favored method here as on the opening track Komad. At just over 10 minutes this song treads the fine line between an utter captivating courage to set up a glorious song structure only to completely demolish it and an irritating tendency to never give you what you think you want. Like a rusty swing in a disused playground this song creeks into view only to be joined by crashing drums and frontman Robert Lombardo's gritty vocals. The swing keeps on creaking for about 5 more minutes until it slowly morphs into a field of distorted synths and muffled beats. Rainbows lays down a bed of delicate clicks that sound like millions of sampled insects then scatters over the top an achingly nostalgic melody. Lombardo's vocals shuffle through all this in a lazy manner but you can rest assured that its the scratchy insect noises that eventually win out and the melody is soon confined to a distant memory.
Scotty is the sound of a crippled merry-go-round on board a sinking oil tanker, its sweet, playful loops barely audible over the crashing sounds all around. But then Sheath-Wet seems to hint at this merry-go-round staging something of a resurrection as its melody rises slowly from the depths, joined by the clumsy clattering of various hard surfaces this plods on for over 11 minutes with vocals drifting in whenever they can be bothered. I don't mean in any way to sound negative about this approach as it is strangely beguiling and if you stick with this song you never want it to finish and at some points you wonder if it ever will. It loops round in a hypnotic, self absorbed fuzz like a child spinning around, eventually losing balance.
As the art work suggests this record has an other-worldly feeling, often mirroring the illogical structure of a dream where nothing seems to fit together but the more time you spend with it the more this disconnection seems to make sense. Until, that is, you try to explain it to someone once it's finished and they look at you blankly, waiting for you to stop. A bit like what I'm trying to do now so I'll shut up and let you experience it for yourself on my recommendation. (I think.)
Review: BC (Jun 5th 2007)
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