Madame Shocking – The Silent Years
My first instinct on listening to Let Go the new EP from The Silent Years is to reach out for the easy RIYLs: Arcade Fire (or Cloud Cult), Vampire Weekend, the Polyphonic Spree. And that’s fair. If you like those bands, there’s plenty here to whet your appetite.
But I don’t want to give the wrong impression. To really grasp what’s going on with The Silent Years, you’d need to combine elements of those three but also toss in a few obscure bands who play to shows of 6 or 7 people and consider themselves to be the painters of sonic landscapes. Because the little guitar wiggles may evoke Vampire Weekend, but really owe a lot more to the experimentalism of past eras – which pulls in ‘world’ sounds but gives them a new dynamic. And that rat-a-tat drums scream Big and Epic but this has nothing to do with aping Funeral and instead is a call to arms for music that doesn’t shy away from itself. Hence the Polyphonic Spree reference.
Or think Brian Wilson several albums after Smile in a parallel universe where he kept the crazy enough in check to keep writing songs.
And really, that’s the amazing thing here. For a record that clearly trends deeply into experimentation and sonic weirdness, it remains completely devoid of artifice. While the sound and style is often opaque, it’s not out of a desire to hide the truth. Instead, it’s all about revealing the truth in all its impossible complexity and ridiculousness. The music bends, bows, crashes, explodes. It’s a casual dab of paint on a white background. It’s the rattling and shaking of a train about to exit a tunnel. It’s the geometry of motion.
Actually, the song titles themselves are as evocative as anything I could write. “Taking Drugs At The Amusement Park” or “Vampires Bite The Hands Feed Them” give you precisely what you’d expect. Or rather, they surprise you exactly as much as you you’d hope they would. In particular the interplay between the horns and drums on the latter track simply defies words. Meanwhile, “Forest Fire” gives you the moment when the little sparks that dance around to light up a cold night reach a critical mass and start to tear across the horizon leaving smoke and ashes in their wake.
And after a minute of toying with you, the final two-thirds of “Madame Shocking” is as nice a pop song as you’re likely to hear this year. It’s driven by a clever little elliptical guitar line and carries you along the top of a wave for miles and miles.
The last two tracks take the foot off the pedal a bit, but on the strength of the opening four tracks, it’s hard to do anything but gush about this record.
Let Go is due out in July but is available through iTunes right now.