For a moment there, it sounds like Joseph Costa sings "I came like falling down," and
I bite my lip (and hope it happens hard enough to leave blood in my mouth), and
wonder if L'altra — a band whose acoustic/electronic analog/digital calm/restless
boy/girl mood music is nothing if not astonishingly tasteful — haven't gone
and gotten a little saucy. These words are the right words to unleash a little
spell, but it doesn't hold, lasting only as long as it takes to realize Costa's
really singing "It came like falling down," speaking not of semen, but of a tangible
absence — as tangible as a change in the weather — that comes whenever
some unnamed other (y'know, like, the girl) isn't around. Costa pushes this to
a place of quiet profundity when he talks of how such loneliness "makes it easier
to suffer, like I always wished for." I'm unsure whether the boy/girl of L'altra — Costa
and Lindsay Anderson — are "mates of state," so to speak, but within the
world of their band, they are wedded together, L'altra the union that binds them
through time. And, whilst it's nice enough knowing that Costa misses Anderson
whilst she's off playing in Pulseprogramming, or performing with Will Oldham,
Telefon Tel Aviv, Slicker, or anyone else keen to add her beautiful voice to
their tunes, it'd be so much more shocking, and shockingly intimate, if the duo — usually
more ethereal than earthy — took you into their intimacy. It's an intimacy
that could easily be afforded by this third L'altra longplayer, which finds the
band no longer being a band, as such, the rhythm section that once propped/post-rocked
them up having slipped away. L'altra have become just the couple, and those musical
dualities — acoustic/electronic analog/digital calm/restless boy/girl — seem
more pronounced now that they're the republic of two; with the electronic elements
of their craft, in particular, coming more to the fore, here, even if that isn't
entirely apparent upon first listen. Aided and abetted by producer Joshua Eustis
(one of the dorky dudes behind epic orchestral-electro soundtrackists Telefon
Tel Aviv), the album uses its lack of rhythm section to let L'altra "drift" in
a different fashion, fashioning rhythms from cut-together percussion parts, electronic
flickers, digital skips, and even the cello of Chicago-scene vet Fred Lonberg-Holm.
It makes for, as is the pair's way, another particularly pretty record; but,
where their prettiness was once cloaked in a shroud of bashful melancholy, with
Eustis on hand things get a little more grandstanding. L'altra's romantic manners
are now less a little love-in, and more a love-for-the-ages, "Morning Disaster" stroking
piano and strings and woodwinds and choral vocals over five and a half minutes
before it reaches its climax, only to quickly curl up, spent. |
