Search - Cue the Doves :: Architectures of the Atmosphere

Acclaimed, thick crunchy atmospherics from MN's best!

A. Martin | Los Angeles, CA USA | 04/12/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"A long time ago, when stumbling around on the mp3.com charts, I found myself in love with a band called The Beautiful Mistake. After a few listens of "Wide Eyes," I eventually got in touch with the guys and a few years later, after releasing a few albums on The Militia Group, the band is finished.



Through these experiences and the connection I found in the band, I made a friend with Jon Berndtson, their bass player who helped with a lot of their songwriting. Needless to say, I was excited to see what he would come up with and he promised big things with his new projects. After countless file transfers of demos and unfinished product, "Architectures Of The Atmosphere" eventually made its way into my mp3 player.



Tonight, I'm torn. Half of me wants to accept the fact that I am friends with the songwriter and catalyst of Cue The Doves and half of me wants to be brutally honest about how I feel about their debut full-length, released on indie label Dead Letter Records. I'm torn between my relationship with their incredibly sincere, genuine songwriter and the necessity to compile a review that is equally sincere and genuine when writing for a webzine I love so much-needless to say, it's a difficult task to balance these afflictions.



So here I am, struggling to find a balance between honesty, integrity, and kindness, and the only way to do it is to be as concise and pithy as possible, avoiding the obvious conflict of interest I have with the band.



After the rather uninteresting intro track, which compiles random sound clips and spacey guitar elements, the album kicks off with a familiar swirling electric guitar. While the guitars are certainly reminiscent of The Beautiful Mistake, the rhythms and drumming are more in tune with mid-90's post-hardcore bands like HUM and Failure. Rampant guitars blast away, shell-shocking the listener with constant tempo and dynamic changes, admittedly being a bit baffling and hard to take down at once.



Technically, the album is filled with chaotic, compelling guitars, often demonstrating Berndtson's ability to write spacey, ear-splitting guitar leads. And while he goes nuts in one headphone, the rhythm guitarist keeps up the pace with pulsating, sharp chord structures.



The singer's voice is considerably harder to pin down. To give him some credit, the most confusing element to nail down with this style of music is likely the vocal melodies. When the guitars and chord structure rarely are clearly stepping outside the box of cookie-cutter metal pop, however, it makes sense that the vocals might be what they are: scattered.



And perhaps that might be the best way to describe the mathy, technical sounds on Cue The Doves' debut. While at moments, the singer hits alignment with the blazing guitars, like on "The Balance," during the quick punching guitars in the pre-chorus, or on the title track's brief vocal melodies ("I believe in the truth..") for the most part he seems to be all over the place.



While confusion ensued for awhile, I found myself slowly sinking into the blurry haze of warring chords and song structure, and eventually, found myself truly enjoying moments on this album. The screamy, torrid intro of "The Red Planet Falls," for example, sheds light into the aggressive nature the band entails, and when the chords churn and the left-balanced guitar hook blazes away during the song's breakdown, it sounds as pleasing as bands like The Deftones and Refused sounded.



The guitar leads and songwriting of this album are often a little confusing, but in moments like "Peregrine Mountain: The Aftermath," which tackles colorful, shoegazed guitars immediately and eventually cascades into a perplexing drop-off with a shouty: "this is where they catch us..." are irrefutably as melodic and fluid as anything on "Downward Is Heavenward" (HUM).



"Architectures Of The Atmosphere" is undeniably a creative, experimental album embracing metal, space-rock, and hardcore. It's confusing, it's messy, it's strange. The end results in a sort of fluidity, however, that is quite impressive. As a whole, the band's style is a foreshadowing of great things to come, and while this might not be the record to do it, I can certainly see a record down the road really breaking them out of the swarm of heavy music consuming the scene. The nature of Cue The Doves is to stray from the mulchy, ranty hardcore and screamo that has inspired and obsessed many songwriters in the music scene. While at moments some might cast it aside as inaccessible, the more curious will embrace it as a truly unordinary exploration into the realm of pop-fused metal and hardcore."