Stars Of The Lid - The Tired Sounds Of (2001)

Two hours of modern-classical infused ambient drift at its most magnificent.  Brian McBride & Adam Wiltzie's mature masterwork came out 16 years ago, and had an almost-as-good followup 6 years later; whether they'll record another album together is anyone's guess, but at least they've both been keeping busy since.  Anyway, here's Tired Sounds, arguably the high watermark of both their' careers to date.

With the long, weightless guitar treatments that had become SOTL's stock in trade now fleshed out by judicious strings, Tired Sounds opened up a new and sophisticated landscape straight away with Requiem For Dying Mothers.  Movingly funereal in its first part, defiantly elegiac in its second, this opening piece sets the tone for the rest of the melancholy, sometimes unsettling first hour.  This reaches its darkest depths in the 12-minute middle section of Austin Texas Mental Hospital, with the strings remorselessly sawing away at the patient's psyche, although some respite does seem to come with the gentle organ-like swells of the final part.

The second disc of Tired Sounds is a slightly more relaxing, Eno-esque drift as a whole, but only once you've come through the colder-than-death Mulholland, sounding like its been recorded from within a body chiller in a morgue.  The mellower highlights of this second hour-long trip into inner space definitely include Piano Aquieu, with its Harold Budd-esque piano intro, but the melancholy still persists in huge, endless waves.  For an album that I've previously described to bemused acquaintances as "suffused with death", on digging it out today Tired Sounds does at least still live and breathe (audibly, in its final minutes) with some hopefulness towards its end.  Beyond essential.

Disc 1
Disc 2

Growing - The Sky's Run Into The Sea (2003)

Much like Labradford’s Fixed::Context, this album from the Kranky stable interested me on its release.  Think I might have still been reading Mojo at the time, who weren’t/aren’t exactly an authority on droning post-rock like this, but must’ve been a good enough description to make me go out and buy it.

At the time of this album, their debut, Growing were an Olympia, WA trio of two guitarists and a drummer.  Much subtler than say, Earth or sunn o))), they began The Sky's Run…. with a few minutes of gentle echo-delay scraping across the guitars, gradually overpowered by a fog of cymbals, before everything settles down into a drone.  Suddenly, the track reaches its closing section on a burst of delayed lead guitar and very briefly the kind of more familiar crunchy, distorted drone that will become more in evidence in the rest of the album.  Don’t miss the nifty little steal from Norwegian Wood in the closing Pavement Rich In Gold, which also features some vocals, albeit largely buried in the fuzz.

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Labradford - Fixed::Context (2001)

Staying in a minimal mood here, but with skeletal reverbed guitar as the main feature instead of just pure electronics.  I picked up Fixed::Context on its release, possibly just from a review I'd read - I think I'd become fascinated by the Kranky label and wanted to take the plunge into this so-called 'post rock' universe.

What I got was an expansive, hushed landscape that could've been the soundtrack to Paris, Texas in outer space - twangy, soundtrack guitars pushed right up front, but made alien by a backdrop of ambient electronics.  Whether enveloping the guitars in a warm bath of Eno-esque sound on my favourite track David, or ending in a mood-shattering whine at the end of Twenty, this was a game-changing introduction to a sound world of electronic music and completely deconstructed rock music, and it became my most favourite new album for the next few years.  After investigating the other Labradford albums, I couldn't wait for the next one - and I'm still waiting 15 years later (apparently they've never officially split up!).

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