At Home with John and Debbie

My friend Chris once introduced me to the music of THRONES, saying “It’s impossible to walk and listen to THRONES at the same time”. I can well believe it, since many THRONES tracks have either a really strange time signature, or syncopation so extreme that it may as well be another time signature. However, I once tried putting Battles’ Mirrored on while jogging, and had to turn it off before I fell over.

Opening track “Race:In” starts with gentle drums, and I can tap my feet to it, but it doesn’t quite feel like 4/4, 3/4 or 12/8. Then in come some guitars, and they don’t fit. Then an odd little synth line, which makes sense, but then comes in again at an unexpected time. I’m not sure how they do it. It never sounds anything but deliberate, and it does fit together.

The album continues in similar vein, mostly instrumental, but with nonsensical vocals in places (including, on “Atlas”, irritating helium squeaking voices). You can’t help but think “isn’t this clever”.

Do I actually like it? Well, I’m not prepared to say I don’t like it yet, and I feel I could come to love it if I put some time in — it would take less time than Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica which has similar problems of approachability, except more so.

I suspect they would be quite a thing to witness live.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 12:41 and is filed under CDs, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.