Badwater, the new album by Chicago’s Speck Mountain, can’t accurately be called rock. The band has in the past referred to its own output as “ambient soul”. Badwater, however, falls somewhere between sugar-free dream pop and post-ambient wrist-slash. Tempos are slow and unchanging, arrangements are economical but lush, and reverb is a prerequisite. The songs are good, the musicianship more than competent, the recording clear and unobtrusive. The most startling characteristic of the album is the nearly maniacal consistency of style, structure, and emotion that persists all the way through.
We enter, through Badwater, a solidly and painstakingly constructed realm of veiled introspection, cool observation, and intelligent lyricism. Instruments are controlled, verses shaped, tones coaxed, riffs owned. We’re pulled onto humorless and overcast plains of wistful melodies and skillful refrains. These are some very pretty hangover jams. It all amounts to a really compelling argument to stay in bed, or perhaps capitulate to a late brunch with the in-laws.
Standout tracks include “Flares”, with its rich and dreamy organ tones, tremolo, and deftly delivered line, “Phosphorize, make your dream a fever”, and the closing track “Watch the Storm”. The latter’s opening guitar riff is so brilliantly wielded it almost makes the rest of the song superfluous.
Clearly at the epicenter of this very slowly and cautiously swirling universe is the voice of Marie-Claire Balabanian. Mercifully, her voice is very tuneful and pleasing. Her melodies are persuasive. But the manner in which the music has been intricately constructed around her lovely voice is almost painfully awkward. It paints a picture of eggshell walking, of multiple tense takes. One gets the sense that, for the band, this album was from the start a triumph rather than a voyage. They seem to be doing what they have always known how to do, and doing it well. But it leaves the listener to wonder what a modicum of creative risk-taking could have conjured. The result would no doubt have been uglier, but most certainly more revealing as well.
- Guest post by Sara C.
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