Planar in this debut release made instrumentals and songs that melt and shift from one to another, from drum machine beat-y, synthesized atmosphere and grooves to slow jam pop piano, guitar, and vocal melodies. I think I generally prefer their instrumentals here, but some of the sung parts are rather nice - I come to find the album overall pretty beautiful, actually - once past such as over-common piano motifs and some vocals that make me fancy I can tell this was made in 2002, during times of many faceless voices singing and scream-singing in the same powerless and frustrated way.
Upon first sight of the album cover and reading the press release, I was prepared to hate the band. After going back and forth, I decided I disliked the cover art - the name "planar" plastered many times over one another toward the bottom over a presumable graphic reproduction of a textural, sort of minimal painting by Damien Ridde that might have been more interesting had it not been reduced to the solid lavender on white semi-gloss paper, cropped with a wandering white boarder a quarter to an eighth-inch in from the edges. It's not that it was a bad idea - if it had just been cropped more, the white space might have taken on interest, or if it had not been cropped at all, and not so overpowered by the "planars" on the bottom, the subtleties of the painting could have come forward. But this was previously released probably on a small budget on Gentle Records, and I appreciate that they may have been taking the cheap route at the printer - single color, not full-bleed on the front. Despite efforts that start to create interest, it just does not work visually. It became in my eyes just a fair idea that somebody may have worked and worked until losing the ability to really see the result with fresh eyes, such that the final product seems like just another half-decent cover, when it could have drawn the viewer into an intimate two-dimensional space on a folded, scratched page out of a journal. This initial hang-up might be picky, and decidedly extra-musical, but to me it did not bode well for the feel of Planar's "Goodbye Atmosphere, Goodbye Traffic."
My second pre-musical problem lies in my more general personal frustration - in the tone set by the photocopied press release sent along with this CD for review. The way these things tend to be written, I think they do a disservice to the artists they glowingly try to describe and detail. I know I overreact - this one is comparatively benign and unassuming. But, frankly, I don't care to be verbally assured that a band holds to "ideals of minimalism and experimentation," or creates a perfect blend styles via influences from electronic to classical music. Such things are tools and moods that will work well for some projects and have no good bearing on others. I feel like some writer is trying to convince me - first, that the band had a good thing going with this release a few years ago in their romantically small apartment with a "simple drum machine" and a few humble synthesizers - and second, that the band has developed and changed - oh, but not excessively so, returning with added members, guitars, and laptop still to their "ideals of minimalism." I know these written pieces are third party attempts, often of well-meaning labels, to give the reviewer a quick feel for where the band fits in the music world, but it makes the band feel impersonal and contrived, with lists of artists they've "toured with or will tour with" seeming like status-seeking name-dropping.
That said, I was thankfully pleasantly surprised at the rather lovely sound of the first two tracks, "Alpha" and "Greater Than" (or "α" and ">"), their cold, cavernous atmosphere and stilled guitar-sounding screeches not unlike the quieter, darker moments in the work of The Antarcticans. In waves, they establish bits of grooves, with various sounds including beeps, static-filled samples, synthesized piano, cello, and guitars, and occasional vocals - sometimes as buried yet somehow soaring as, say, the gorgeously interesting, long transitions between those yelling rock songs on mewithoutYou's "A-->B Life." And sometimes the music here sounds like reasonably nice female fronted pop, or, in moments, the average duo vocals of an adolescent, emotional pop-rock band - such as when hints of screaming appear at the emotion-wrought conclusion of this album. They actually lose much of their interest when they move to the latter - still sounding okay, but just rather monotonously average - although, admittedly, the scream-singing is buried and distorted enough to maintain some interest.
While noting my waned interest in some of the parts driven more by piano, pop-rock guitar, or the corresponding average-sounding pop-rock vocals, I had to question my perception of the more electronic, atmospheric, and minimalist parts. Even though I find myself into much of the latter three areas of music lately, perhaps I am not sufficiently exposed to discerningly judge these kinds of music. And so I doubted myself multiple times in developing my opinion of this body of work. Still, I even like the somewhat transitional tracks "Delta" (I keep reading Δ as "change of") and "Gamma" (the only track here I would describe fairly as quite minimal), when either track could easily have been nakedly boring. I remain consistently fairly fascinated by the instrumentals in this work, and I similarly quite enjoy most of the songs and their vocals, if somewhat less so.
Part of my hang-up with some of the songs lies in some lyrics and sampled phrases about relationships, loss, and confusion - that feel too vague and without enough context to make me feel or sympathize with the emotions that they obviously attempt to convey. These things have lost some of their initial annoyance with me - such as the supposedly climactic scream-singing toward the end of the long (and, leading up to the moment quite interesting instrumentally and in form) final song. The problems remain, but I do not find them as harsh as my initial reaction seemed to indicate.
I was ambivalently leery of their track list, the song titles as math terms, including naming letters of the Latin alphabet. On one hand, it feels pretentiously oblique in meaning, but on the other hand, I can appreciate the seeming hijacking of heady, cold terms for one's personal meaning as emotional signifiers. It hints at an intellect-versus-emotion tension in the album. The music uses both electronic and traditional instrumentation, and I suppose there stands a bit of duality of inorganic-versus-organic sound. I wish at moments that the lyrics carried a bit more of the side of impersonal, hard, factual details as well, for the sake of more affecting music if not for the sake of consistency.
All in all, I enjoy this album as I get past some of my qualms about some of the musical decisions and much of the extra-musical communication. It is well done, and I am interested to see how they have pulled things off on their new album.
2/4
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