erasing clouds
 

Amp, All of Yesterday Tomorrow

reviewed by dave heaton

"The music of Amp is, and always has been, the endeavour to create sonic spaces where pure sound is as expressive in the emotion/content of a tune as the lyric or melody line," it says in the liner notes to All of Yesterday Tomorrow…and I couldn't have said it better myself. Amp are defiantly experimental – improvising, messing around, creating adventurous storms of sound that churn and push and challenge and question. But there's the essence of song here, too: The melodies and emotions that people want from a simple pop song. The best are seldom truly simple, and likewise Amp's music isn't simple even when it seems so, when it seems like they're just making noise with their guitars and twiddling knobs on their amps.

This three-disc set is as comprehensive a portrait of Amp's music as could be expected: a dream for fans and a world to explore for newcomers. It tells their story mostly through the detours: limited-edition tracks, unreleased tracks, rare collaborations. It's a shadow biography, so appropriate for a group whose whole career has been like a journey through the shadows, an attempt to use sound to grasp the ungraspable.

Taken as a whole this over-three-hour collection contains all sorts of musical architecture: fuzz clouds, drones, drifts, mazes, lullabies, rocket launches, pastoral reveries, radio hits cowering under blankets of anxious noise. And all of them puzzles in some way.

Someone could draw up a map or write a field guide for All of Yesterday Tomorrow alone; it's too expansive for me to try and sum up the highest points in one review. Still, I'm finding myself especially taken with: set-opening blast "Sketch a Star"; the short, gentle piano-and-flute moment "There She Goes"; the eerie, subterranean "Lutin", the rather psychedelic, garbled-pop exorcism "Silencer"; the minimalist murmurings of "Noir Et Noir"; the bright yet hazy "Moon Tree"; the playful cover of the Silver Apples' immortal "Seagreen Serenades"; the somehow steely, pulsating and drifting "Televisionface"; and the pretty keyboards-and-fog set-closer "When You Have Love".

Here there's songs that evoke in small ways seekers of various stripes: Brian Eno, Flying Saucer Attack, Jesus and Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, a whole host of electronic experimentalists and ambient/drone explorers, and the two groups Amp covers here, Silver Apples and Spacemen 3. But Amp is entirely its own force of nature, and a truly visionary one at that. Don't take them for granted; even in our anything-goes time their style of emotional, intuitive, fearless, song-and-soundscape-centered exploration is something to cherish.

{www.rroopp.com}


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