The murky, ambient dreamscapes on Zelienople's second
album recall the drifting, space-rock detritus of
early Labradford, underpinned by loose songs relayed
through the blurry whispers and murmurs of Matt
Christensen's vocals. But this Chicago quartet's music
also reaches further back, to the atmospheric
post-punk austerity of The Cure (circa Faith) and Joy
Division. If Sleeper Coach is far less emotionally
explicit than either of these forbears, there is still
a discernable dynamic, a momentum typified by
hollow-sounding basslines reverberating beneath the
greyed-out wash of ambient sound.
Zelienople's music isn't expressed through any sense of urgency, but
rather a slow, considered series of expositions that
maintain a distance between what is being played and
what we're hearing through a persistent
semi-opaqueness of character. Depending on your
viewpoint, this either lends the music a sense of
mystery or obscures it with some needlessly oblique
window-dressing. But providing your expectations
harmonize with the band's outlook, what you get is
seductive, slow-mo melancholia submerged in a dense,
sensory aura.
Within its isolation-tank world the band traces
sparse, pulsating rhythms, sometimes, as on "Sea
Bastards," with an air of graceful detachment,
elsewhere with a more focused groove — "Softkiller"
and "Dr Brilliant" convey a sense of inexorability in
spite of their spectral arrangements. "Underneath"
reverberates more abstractly, while the instrumental
"Corner Lost" beats out a distant march like a ghostly
echo of Joy Division's "The Eternal."
On occasion the
tendency towards abstraction dominates completely and
the band dissolves into an amorphous mass of sound,
but even here the music retains an organic character,
with loose drone sounds and clusters of guitar notes hanging together in a kind
of stasis. The
sound throughout is fluid, certainly with an
improvised spirit, even as the tracks come together in
their individual arrangements. There are elements
that seem almost familiar, even comforting, amid the
blank, ambient noise, such as the folk-guitar melody
running through "Don't Be Lonely" and the gentle
lullaby quality of "Ship That Goes Down," helping to
provide a connection between the dreamlike siren call
of the band's songs and the gentle, rippling movement
of abstract flurries.
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