Review Summary: Revelatory. Alex Robertson tries for the second time to convince you why.
I listen to FiRES WERE SHOT's Solace
for the same reasons that someone would listen to, say, Godspeed You! Black Emperor's F#A#∞
or My Bloody Valentine's Loveless
--which is to say that this band has the ability to instantly transport me to that special place
with a simple strum of their guitars (in this case, the two-note motif that opens "Aside Herself"). Not only that, though, but they also have the courtesy to let me explore that same world for an hour or so before the album ends. But while Godspeed were famous for their attention to detail (and their ability to apply it to their own visions of the apocalypse) and My Bloody Valentine reveled in the beautiful noise they elicited from their guitars, Texan duo FiRES WERE SHOT are a slightly different beast. In a way, they're the best of both worlds, combining the complex structuring of the post-rock clan with the attention to tone and sonic vibrance of modern drone and ambient groups.
Not only do these qualities allow them to write breathtakingly beautiful opuses like "Hiroshima" and closer "Balfour Hollis", but it also allows for something unusual and exciting in modern music: a sense of motion. It may be hard to imagine something like direction and movement being imposed onto a format like music, but the duo pull it off. Take, for example, "Eierie", which begins with the oscillating malfunction of some alien device, a loop of which is repeated until it slowly collapses in on itself. From the rubble of this fascinating disaster arises a circling guitar line--suddenly, the listener is thrust into the next "phase" of the song, the peculiar opening now merely a distant memory. Again, in "Hollow": a reverberating "plunk" is heard, perhaps the sound of a stone being dropped into water, or of a microphone being knocked on, or of a mallet being hit against a bongo (this sort of clever sonic ambiguity makes the album all the more intriguing). This unexplained tone is suddenly overtaken by a lumbering acoustic guitar line, with which a screeching electric drone (think John Cale's electric viola on The Velvet Underground's debut) desperately tries to keep pace. Toward the end, a brilliant discovery is made: the "plunk" that manifested in the beginning never truly disappeared, it was simply burrowed under the layers of guitar and drone that gave it musical significance. Suddenly, the aforementioned sense of direction contained within the album throws you for a loop when it reveals that this all-new environment is actually comfortably familiar. The album thrives on moments like these: to listen to Solace
is to be thrusted head-first into a world that is both beautiful and extremely foreign, in which you move through different environments with each song (and sometimes within
a song), each more different than the last.
However, to say that Solace
atmosphere would be to sell the band short. Even without its distantly gorgeous strings and the strangely pleasurable fuzz that permeates throughout, "Hiroshima" is an example of a song that still boasts a hell
of a melody--one that anyone, fan of "drone" music or not, can enjoy. It's also a song that shows that, when stripped of the distorted lens it views its own environment through, Solace
becomes quite a simple album, really. Most of these songs are based off simple folk melodies or modest chord progression. Alone, these are frequently excellent bits by themselves, but the importance lies in the fact that they're blown up to sound bigger than the world. And do they.
Despite my best efforts, I'm not exactly sure what it is these two Texans are doing. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that "Solice", barely over a minute, makes me give a good long think about my life. Or that "Lattice" is akin to watching the sky majestically crack open. Or that, by the end of "Balfour Hollis"--which piles on layers of acoustic guitars to one of the most gorgeous chord progressions ever--I feel like I'm sitting on the top of the world, looking down. Whatever it is, it's pure magic for me . If it isn't for everyone else, that's fine; I know that, whenever I need them, these two will be there for me, acoustic guitars and effects pedals in tow, ready to cleave spheres of novel activity in this little made-up world of theirs. A world that was made by them, yes, but one that belongs entirely to me.