If any label can get away with dumping eight releases on the market at once, it’s Chicago’s Kranky Records, whose contemplative, soothing, and always-fascinating oeuvre makes for perfect winter music. Flagship band Low unleashes their sixth full-length with Trust. Minnesota’s original slowcore trio continues playing around with increased textures and overt rock, but ultimately, they fall short of the intensity delivered on 2001’s Things We Lost in the Fire. After two remarkable albums recorded with Low’s Alan Sparhawk, Jessica Bailiff returns with a home-recorded eponymous effort that demonstrates her uncanny balance of emotive songcraft and gentle, experimental washes of sound. Lilith fare this is not. … Representing Kranky’s jazzier side is Portland, Ore.’s Fontanelle, whose second LP Style Drift plays more like a hornless, intergalactic fusion ensemble with an unhealthy Can fixation. Percolating key blips and Fender Rhodes piano throb underneath Michael Faeth’s peppery, funkified drumming. … Several new acts have joined Kranky’s stable of late, including the mysterious Christmas Decorations, whose Model 91 combines the cold, glasnost claustrophobia of early Eighties post-punk with a more modern sonic architecture. Another debut on Kranky is the white-hot S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D. by Out Hud, the label’s most decisive venture onto the dance floor. Out Hud manages to retain a cerebral air through their intricate weave of acid-house beats run through a dub-tronic delay processor. On his second release, Loscil‘s Scott Morgan has gotten even more cerebral. Submers, with each track named after an actual submarine, is a remarkable sojourn through an aquatic realm of lush, ambient techno, with an array of pulses and thuds drawing attention to the enveloping orchestral drones behind them. Keith Fullerton Whitman established a rep generating the spastic beats of Hrvåtski, but on his solo debut, he emerges as a pure sound sculptor, generating naked, Phil Niblock-like waves of sound through treated, processed guitar. The delicately nuanced Playthroughs is a must for drone junkies. The same can be said for Avec Laudenum, the reissued 2000 album from Austin expatriates Stars of the Lid. Avec Laudenum represented the first substantial injection of more melodic, compositional elements into the classic S.O.L. drone methodology. … ST 37 headlines a pair of new comps, appearing alongside related groups Bahrain, Jherri Sigghnfeld’s Atropheed Sac, Three Day Stubble, and Book of Shadows on Whats for Drugs? (Ant Lunch Musick), and with Coz the Shroom on Beasts of the Night Gather Together (Nut Music), a tribute to outlandish performance artist/auteur Lisa “Suckdog” Carver.
This article appears in February 14 • 2003.