erasing clouds
 

Namelessnumberheadman, Wires Reply

reviewed by dave heaton

I hereby vow to never again use words like “amalgam” or “hybrid” to describe the Kansas City band Namelessnumberheadman’s music. By now – their third album Wires Reply -- the sci-fi electronic side of their music and the rustic acoustic side have become so organically fused that it isn’t fair to even talk about it as a combination, as some kind of experiment; those words imply tentative steps towards something new, but there’s nothing tentative about their music. By now this is just what they do, it’s what their music is: its own entity. Three men play acoustic guitar and keyboards and drums and who knows what else. They make music that sounds ancient and futuristic, of the natural world and of the modern one.

And that natural/modern dialogue is especially pertinent to Wires Reply: it’s in the music and a central theme of the lyrics. It’s an album marked by layers of sound; it’s as if the layers could be mapped out, like the layers of the earth, except that we’re dealing with clouds and other intangibles here, not solid rock. The album opens with unleashed drums but then glides onto pillowy surfaces: comfortable but active, with rising harmony voices, progressing guitars, and strange sounds that could be insects or UFOs. The opening lyrics suggest it’s insects: “Spider legs, cicada wings and pulsing wet worms / fingernails and petrified leaves’ veins.” With intricate details we also get proclamations, promises of comfort when the civilized world disintegrates and we’re headed back to nature: “When all the brigs are blown apart, I’ll shelter you.”

The second track – an especially soothing, building and complicated one called “The Beginning” (their big radio hit, in my dream world) – has a ringing chorus that offers another promise, an elusive one: “I’ll follow through with what I say.” The sense of anticipation that something is about to happen builds with the next song “The Hour Has Come,” which introduces the circuitry imagery of the album title while also implying impending something: “Small stage for steady hands / and the hour has come.” Matching the piqued interest those words communicate is the music, which sounds simple enough at first (drums, piano), but there’s so much more to it. Is that something electronic moving under brushed drums? Listen close; this is one of those albums, where the closer you listen the more you hear.

Listen to the banjo enter on “Branches of Branches of Branches”; the techno pulse that slides into something completely different a little ways into “An Argument to Stand On”; the crackling sounds in the break of “Opposable Thumb,” which also boasts an explosive, vaguely Flaming Lips-ish instrumental hook; the piano accompanied by strange on/off machine and/or breathing sounds during the gorgeous and completely eerie “Scatterbirds.” Or simply listen to the numerous times a few voices sing together, a temporary choir. Or how disarmingly direct, how earnest, the one voice singing is during “An Argument to Stand On,” after the pulsating beat disappears. “I’m so sure of myself / I’m uncompromising / without fear / without a chance / without an argument to stand on.” It’s easy to imagine these words as the outlook of a stubborn leader taking the people down with him (the President, say?)…but by the end of the song the same heartfelt vocals seem to take the perspective of the people on the other side of the story, feeling both anger and dwindling hope: “…while my prayers for peace are littered with profanity.”

As the album proceeds, the more it starts to resemble one story, or at least a song series built around recurring themes: global birth and death, war, environmental destruction, and rebirth, nature reclaiming what man destroyed. “Free / safely gone / you’re unhindered from the trappings of this town,” voices sing on the album’s final track. They could be simply saying goodbye to a friend who’s left town, but in the context of this album they could be singing goodbye to the whole human race. Perhaps that’s why they sing and play with more spirit and drive than ever, why their voices soar and the instruments strike with the force of lightning. In either case the impression the song gives is one of both release and uncertainty, freedom and confusion. It’s like this remarkable album itself: a daring step forward that’s also filled with a deep sense of yearning and a sincere, somewhat worried curiosity about what tomorrow will bring.

{www.namelessnumberheadman.com}

(Note: Album available digitally from itunes or emusic; on vinyl from St Ives, through Secretly Canadian's distro)


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