Friday, July 14, 2006
CD Review: Super Love Attack’s This Up Here
41 gorgeous blocks. Holden Caulfield walked them at some point in his wanderings in The Catcher in The Rye. Can't help but get the impression that he would have been cured of the claustrophobic brain-malady that afflicted him if he had had the 42 gorgeous minutes of Super Love Attack's This Up Here to listen to on his way. Over the course of the album's eleven stunning tracks, modern life's stresses and apprehensions become impalpable, merely more insubstantial vapour in Earth's atmosphere. It's priority number one when attempting to describe Super Love Attack's sound; try your damndest to convey just how enormous and capacious it really is.
They describe themselves as an attack of the aural senses, and while I think the aggression inherent in such a description is overkill considering the airy atmospherics of their music, the general sentiment is accurate in its own amusing way. They aren't messing around, these guys (and girl). On this, their first LP, they aren't middling, self-consciously experimenting, or limiting the goodness to brief glimpses of their future potential. No, they're a band that has seemingly immediately hit its stride. They've already adeptly crafted their sound. Though they list My Bloody Valentine and The Pixies among their influences, on This Up Here those influences are worn on the undershirt as opposed to on the sleeve, as SLA displays the focus, clarity, and coherence of sound that both bands eschewed (to awesome affect, of course).
This Up Here is certainly a sensory experience, one that frequently rewards perspicacity not so much with multi-leveled meanings but with sophisticatedly layered moods. SLA relies much more on atmosphere than driving riffs or catchy hooks which makes the album a truly serene experience even at its darkest and most chaotic. It's a record that pays dividends to the listener willing to play it from beginning to end and regard it as one cohesive experience. The album is one long, transcendent arm grasping at the cosmos (much like the angel reaching skyward for the heart on the album's cover), making it difficult and virtually pointless to discuss it in terms of lyrical pointedness or individual tracks (although the album certainly has it's standouts: "Moonpi", "Alien", "Hero"). Every track is deeply vested not only in warm, enchanting sound but in evoking images of drifting fog accross expansive landscapes, lavish space panoramas and a universe whose various constituent elements coalesce into one far-reaching, harmonious whole. It's in the stark contrast between these images and the nebulous nihility and oblivion of everyday life that SLA achieve the transcendence they're so devotedly reaching for.
When SLA hits it big (upon hearing them, there can be no doubt that they will) they'll join a growing list of relatively recent bands (a list that includes talents like Granddady and Band of Horses) whose idiosyncratic reliance on atmosphere over typical rock structures and exacting lyrical messages lends their music a less palpable yet more immediate and lucid pertinence to life. They've already got everything but the fame: a distinctive sound, a rad record, and the best band name since Schizo Fun Addict.
