Stamen & Pistils

Towns

(Echelon)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

This kinda comes out sounding a little like some slightly lo-fi acoustic touched Postal Service at first, with non-acoustic beats and grooves going on. The vocals touch a little between the Death Cab and the Modest Mouse camps, mellow and moving. It is strange to call something with definite electric sounds going on acoustic, but it has that mood – mellow electro-acousticlash. The second song suddenly breaks out and flies straight for some Smiths mood, again with the sound effects grooving in strange off beat places, but breaking up the guitar brit poppy strum in unexpectedly interesting ways. On the third song ,some female vocals move in alongside the main male voice, and the music spreads out further and darker. Sort of like if the Elephant 6 bands were listening to more Sixteen Horsepower and spending time down in Louisiana swamps. There are definite southern goth sounds here, but the songs continue shifting styles throughout the album and it’s hard to settle in to a particular mood. Sometimes it’s nice to just relax into the feel of an album, but here I go from wanting to hear more This Mortal Coil moodiness to aching to hear the more minimal and straight forward beats that touch upon a strange balance between the Swans and My Dad Is Dead. It’s just hard to focus on this album, the vocals moving in as many different directions as the instrumentation, and I can’t tell what I’m going to get hit with next.