Turn on and space out
somethingexcellent | Lincoln, NE United States | 11/06/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"I was a long-time fan of the group Yume Bitsu back when they were launching their broiled space rock epics from the upper-northwest corner of the United States. After that group ran its course, member Adam Forkner kept on keeping on, collaborating with groups like World, Surface of Eceyon and others, while releasing music under the name [[VVRSSNN]] and finally White Rainbow.
The latter name is what Forkner has been going under now for about the past five years, and in that time he's been incredibly prolific, putting out a couple CDRs, several full-lengths, and an audacious/indulgent 5CD/DVD box set that really hit the spot at times while falling off the surface of the earth at others. Since his incredibly consistent albums with Yume Bitsu, I've always found his releases as White Rainbow to be a bit hit-or-miss, and while he showed some real solid forward progress on his Kranky Records debut Prism of Eternal Now, I feel like "New Clouds" is his big leap forward.
Musically, it contains the same massive scope as the best Yume Bitsu work (in this case, 4 tracks run almost 70 minutes in length), while combining little bits of everything from space rock to ambient to kraut music and drone. It's one of those releases where the first four times I listened to it, I decided that a different cut was my favorite. In the end, though, I keep going back to the entire thing as a singular, breathing entity that plays out beautifully in a single sitting.
As mentioned above, it's certainly not for those looking for a pop-oriented structure. Texturally and sonically, it's immediately encompassing, but it doesn't have the sort of intricate melodic structures that are hummable. It's much more likely to lap at your ears with gentle tugs before pulling you under the surface with a steady current.
While there are tracks on the album that are longer (all of them, actually) and others that are slightly more dynamic, the piece that I find myself going back to the most is "Major Spillage." It's one of the most gorgeous things that I've heard this year, with heavily-reverbed guitar chord strums that slowly get swallowed up by electronic shimmers, looping percussion, swaths of synth and vocals, and a massive bass groan. There's really nothing fancy about it, except that the layers fall together in all the right ways over the course of 12 minutes, moving from a peaceful trickle to a powerful wave and back again.
That's pretty much the modus operandi for the rest of the album as well. There isn't any verse-chorus-verse-chorus action here, but there are four nice journeys that start in one place and end in a slightly different one with some ebullient lifts along the way. I could say that it's the cooler fall weather that's influencing my decision on this one, but the truth is that I've been listening to it consistently for weeks now. Outstanding.
(from somethingexcellent reviews)"
