Monks In The Wood – Echoes
Buyers beware! Products that advertise the ability to do a million different things aren’t to be trusted. No engineer will ever bother putting so much work into one tiny contraption. These gizmos are designed this way simply at the request of the marketing department, which doesn’t care how quickly these things break or whether they take out somebody’s eye when they do.
Bands that do many things all at once are either the work of genius or cover bands that should play small weddings and get paid poorly. There’s rarely an in-between, and the vast majority of those who attempt such feats are simply lousy groups with little vision. The ones who can handle such complexity and marry it to the ultimate goal are playing some kind of four-dimensional chess.
It’s hard to figure Monks In The Wood out, and this is exactly how they like it. On “Echoes,” one moment, they sound like Sunny Day Real Estate fans charing a good cry together, and the next, they are a loose, psychedelically-touched, indie-dance group. Most impressive is how all of these transitions are smooth, made to feel as unnoticeable as air turbulence during a half-hour flight. Monks In The Wood are going in a few directions all at once, but there’s a plan for all of this.
Spectral Gates – warning
Eye-witness accounts still recall how live audiences, when first witnessing Kraftwerk of Yellow Magic Orchestra, would collectively gasp, turn to their friends and whisper: “But where are the guitars, though?” The fact remains that pop music established a standard early on. It was hard to be taken serious if you arrived to the party without a chorus or a guitar case.
And that’s precisely what helped make experimental, electro-driven music so interesting for such a long time. It was the avant-garde. Until it wasn’t… It’s rarer now to find professional producers who are proficient on guitars. And it’s extremely rare to find one who isn’t a master of music software, controllers, or even modern-day synths. Their sounds are all over the radio. So, where should we expect the “otherwordly” quality of the music to come from?
Spectral Gates offer a potential solution for those starved for an electro-rock blend that is stuck halfway between being a radio hit and a contemporary art exhibit. Unlike some of their now-famous predecessors, they are not looking for a place to rest their flag. “Warning” shows that Spectral Gates have a very clear direction in mind. They’re imagining a kind of disco music for unhinged mathematicians. It’s what computers might mumble to themselves as they try to learn the steps to the rhumba.
