ARTiST: Espers
ALBUM: III
BiTRATE: 182kbps avg
QUALiTY: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.97 Final / -V2 --vbr-new / 44.100Khz
LABEL: Drag City
GENRE: Indie
SiZE: 65.08 megs
PLAYTiME: 0h 47min 25sec total
RiP DATE: 2009-11-24
STORE DATE: 2009-10-20
Track List:
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01. I Can't See Clear 4:14
02. Road of Golden Dust 5:07
03. Caroline 3:22
04. Pearl 4:49
05. That Which Darkly Thrives 5:14
06. Sightings 5:12
07. Meridian 3:13
08. Another Mood Song 6:03
09. Colony 4:18
10. TrollslΣnda 5:53
Release Notes:
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When Philly collective Espers entered the stage with their 2004 self-titled LP,
they rode the freak-folk wave that was then taking over indie and made it
freakier, adding a spaced-out acid-rock sensibility that took them to some
unexplored middle ground between Bert Jansch and Hawkwind. When I interviewed
Devendra Banhart around that time, Banhart made a big point about how the new
weird America vanguard wasn't actually folk at all, pointing out along the way
that the Espers folks were all big Sabbath fans. Made perfect sense. Chuck Eddy
(my former editor at The Village Voice), once pointed out that that first
album-- and the one after it, 2006's II-- sounded like wispy, atmospheric
goth-metal (Katatonia, say, or Candlemass) with all the metal stuff stripped
away. Totally true. It also sounded something like screwed-and-chopped Renn
Faire music. It was some seriously blissed-out opium-den shit.
On III opener "I Can't See Clear", something's different. The tempo has crept up
a couple of notches. The drums are actually audible in the mix. Meg Baird's
voice remains as otherworldly as ever, but she's using it to sing a relatively
straightforward melody. In short, "I Can't See Clear" sounds like pure Renn
Faire music-- not screwed, not chopped, just straight. There's still a great
little psych guitar lead in there, but the addictive gloom of previous albums is
gone. And, for the most part, it stays gone throughout III. Only one song breaks
the six-minute barrier. The vocals, from Baird and leader Greg Weeks, aren't
quite so buried in the mix. The arrangements come relatively packed and, at
times, almost choked or cluttered. When violins start dive-bombing the lovely
ethereal acoustic harmonies of "Sightings", for instance, it's like the band is
actively resisting the afghan-rug rapture they're capable of.
So what we've got here is Espers' move toward simplicity and directness, a look
that doesn't suit them especially well. Those arrangements are a big part of the
problem. Weeks has numbers at his disposal-- the first time I saw Espers live,
they peaked at 12 people onstage. And on III, he apparently can't resist using
those numbers. So moments that would've worked fine with just an acoustic guitar
or a murmuring organ get both, plus a spindly violin or a flanged-out electric
guitar or some kind of mandolin thing. When you're using all these folks to
crank out some sort of stoned drone-raga, it works a whole lot better than when
you're trying to play a simple folk song. The songs on III seem to want to be
simple folk songs. And unlike on previous albums, the players aren't always
pushing each other higher into new celestial realms. Sometimes, they're just
getting in each other's way.
And yet there's an implacable heaviness to this band that III doesn't even come
close to dissipating. Moments on the album rank among the band's heaviest, and a
few of the riffs here (on "That Which Darkly Thrives", on "Meridian") could be
just utterly kick-ass stoner metal riffs if played on huge distorted guitars
rather than tiny lutes or whatever. If Espers don't float off into the ether on
III as often as they once did, they still get closer, more often, than just
about anyone else who came to prominence during our last great freak-folk wave.
Long may they eerily flutter.