The amp is a prism here, refracting guitar and bass notes into rainbow
shards of altered colors. Wresting dreamlike textures out of
long, vibrating sounds, the duo are playing not so much their instruments as
their sound system. A single note may continue for minutes on end, tweaked
by
slight movements of the guitar with relation to the speakers to create a shifting
system of overtones and undertones, tones that can live on long past the
initial pressure of finger on string. Sometimes one member or the other
will pause to switch instruments, putting the guitar down to snatch up a
bass, while the mesh of tones rings on out of the amplifiers.
Live, Growing are almost unbearably loud, the kind of loud that rumbles up
out of the floorboards and flutters the clothes on your body, the kind of
loud that literally hurts. They opened for Comets on Fire when I saw them,
and it will give you some sense of the volume when I say that my ears
started to recover, a little, during Comets' "Bee and Cracking
Egg." Yet here on their fourth record, the same songs that annihilated in
concert become meditative, peaceful, even beautiful. The two longest
cuts, "Fancy Period" and "Blue Angels," have an almost hallucinatory grace,
a drone that lifts rather than pulverizes, that fractures into soaring
interludes of synthetic, church-organ-like tranquility. Changes in tone
and mood emerge gradually in these 10-minute-plus tracks. A billow of pure
tone subsides into abrasive, artfully timed blasts of static and
sonic-boom-like blurts of melody in "Fancy Period". "Blue Angels" is
layered with long-sustained tones, that dense web of sounds providing
foundation for the slow soar of pipe-organ grandeur. The compactly stated
"Cumulusless" sounds, again, like an organ piece, notes pinging and
reverberating over a scratchy, skipping motif. The high and low tones
never quite coalesce, working in counterpoint, occasionally intersecting
but not touching, suggesting the unbridgeable space between earth and sky.
"Green Pastures" is a far denser mesh of notes, a cascade of quick sounds
chased by its shadow, all fluttering over a hissing bed of mild
distortion. This pastoral music evokes fleeting images, like water
falling, horses galloping or grasses blowing, but then it runs abruptly
into a wall of blazing feedback. That's Growing at their core:
tranquil, meditative soundscapes that can nonetheless burn a hole through
your ear. With the CD, at least, you can turn it down to manageable volume.
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