REVIEW: Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage: Animation
Music
- Chelsea Spear
Three years ago, the Olivia Tremor Control took the underground rock world by storm with their first long-player, Music from the Unrealised Film Script, "Dusk At Cubist Castle". The album was far from perfect, but it was a heady combination unheard of in indie-rock circles: strange and beautiful pop songs that would be top ten hits in any other galaxy rubbed shoulders with musique concrete sound collages. Now, the mind-bending ensemble returns to the fray with another cinematically inspired album, Black Foliage: Animation Music. It too is charmingly imperfect, but it shows a great deal of growth and maturity for the ever-intriguing Olivias.
Once again, the album is rife with pop tunes, gorgeous bites of melody performed with passion and love by a band that seems to only know how to create that. Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss play off one another like a postmodern Lennon and McCartney; Hart writes the kind of three-minute tunes that populated AM radio in the 1960s (such as the irresistable "Hideaway"), while Doss brings his listeners into a thicket of black foliage through dreamy, cinematic musical effects (especially on the twinkling "Grass Cannons"). The two minds come together on "I Have Been Floated", a crescendic mini-opera starring many of the band's cronies from the Elephant 6 Recording Company, and on "Sylvan Street", a gorgeously droning tune with a duelling banjo/guitar bridge and an acapella coda worthy of Smile-era Beach Boys.
Likewise, the production is superb. While fairly lo-fi production technique gave the band's last album a simple sound that put the attention squarely on the music, Robert Schneider's boardwork helps the band to get the most out of their unique sound, and paints the album in bright sonic colours and deep shading.
If there's any fault to be found in this otherwise superb album, it's one of balance. The band still hasn't found the right balance between conceptual sound collage and music. While some of the musique-concrete material is wisely interspersed between songs, there's still a patch towards the end of the album made up of just sound collage, which can be difficult listening.
All and all, this is a minor point in quibbling with such monumental greatness. The Olivia Tremor Control have created a challenging and breathtakingly beautiful album, one that will likely influence smart, passionate musicians for years to come.
