Against Love
1. Against Love
2. Autumn Song
3. After Love
4. Queen Of The Sun
5. Singer 1968
6. Moon Shadows
7. Our Love's A Calamity
8. Alex Lucero
9. Dull Knives
10. Hips
11. Cursed Ages
12. Tropical Depression
2. Autumn Song
3. After Love
4. Queen Of The Sun
5. Singer 1968
6. Moon Shadows
7. Our Love's A Calamity
8. Alex Lucero
9. Dull Knives
10. Hips
11. Cursed Ages
12. Tropical Depression
In popular music, the past is fertile
ground for plundering. In recent decades in particular, musicians have
long spent time building on the post-punk era, then the 1980s. Lately,
it's the 1990s' turn to be pillaged as young bands take a second look at
the lo-fi sounds, synth-based R&B, and straight-ahead indie rock
sounds that were the cutting edge less than 20 years ago. So what do you
do if you're a band slugging it out in indie rock clubs that was
actually a part of that 1990s sound people are returning to? They may
not have asked themselves that specific question, but Jason McNeely and
Dan Matz have answered it anyway by revisiting some old sounds
themselves on Against Love, their eighth album as the leaders of
Windsor for the Derby.
They released their debut, Calm Hades Float, in 1996, and it
was mostly an ambient/drone record. I still listen to it occasionally,
and it sounds good, though very much of its era-- there's a texture to
the sound that characterized most mid-fi indie rock before digital
recording setups became commonplace. It's a roughness they'd mostly
moved away from over the last decade, building their albums around more
traditional-ish songs as they developed the band, and relegating the
ambient aspect of their work to a handful of tracks spread across each
record. Against Love doesn't really mess with that format much,
but from a sonic standpoint, it's a move to reconcile their recent
direction with their distant past. It shows clearly in the instrumental
tracks, which serve mostly as connective tissue but nonetheless lend the
album much of its character. "Moon Shadows", positioned almost exactly
at the album's midpoint, could practically be a Calm Hades Float
outtake, with its deep, swelling loop of a drone. The album also begins
and ends with snippets of scraping drone that sounds culled from the
same recording.
The vocal songs are mostly quiet and reflective: "Cursed Ages" backs
its vocal with a repetitive guitar figure and rolling toms, but it's
when the Krautrock-y keyboards come in that it really starts to feel
like it would have fit in 15 years ago. "Autumn Song" similarly looks
back, with its heaving guitar, downplayed vocal, and static harmony.
Some songs do keep things cleaner: "Our Love's a Calamity" is among the
band's lightest songs to date, with its sing-song organ part and unison
singing on the chorus. The steel guitar on "Dull Knives" is similarly
bright, but the song itself feels like an exhausted relative of Mojave 3
or even Luna.
The album's tendencies-- toward revisiting the band's earlier, less
polished sound and toward clean, clear, and understated songs-- lend Against
Love a certain disunity. It's interesting that the band revisits
some of its old methods, but the integration isn't quite total. The
album's seams don't detract from the quality of the individual pieces,
however, and it seems likely that in an iTunes world, different
listeners will find themselves gravitating to one of the two sides the
band displays here. It'll be interesting to see whether the band
continues back toward the loop-based approach on its next album and what
it yields.
— Joe Tangari, June
23, 2010 Pitchfork
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