Charles Atlas is two gentlemen from San Francisco making calm, quiet ambient post-rock. Guitars, vintage keyboards, ghostly voices and the occasional cello are all found on Felt Cover, but not all at once. This album is not minimal in the traditional melodic or rhythmic sense of the word; it's that the amount of stuff that happens in any one track is kept at a minimum. This is the kind of album where a plucked guitar note is allowed to ring unaccompanied until it decays completely, and two chords are more than enough.
"The Light They Intend for You" is a perfect example of this sonic reduction, as two guitar chords, misty wet with rain, are slowly plucked as some dialogue (oddly, an excerpt from the Jerry Stahl book Permanent Midnight) is whispered beneath the sound. There are a couple chord changes and a bit of organ accent, but that's about it for this short piece. It's more than a little Labradford-esque, but at pop-song length, and without the tension that Labradford bring to the table. "Hinged and Still" has more teeth, as the guitar this time duals with a woozy, cascading synthesizer pattern that lends a sense of uncertainty.
Charles Atlas stake out jazzier territory with "Valdiviam" where trumpet, brushed drums and a Fender Rhodes give the feel of an impressionistic early-70s Chick Corea piece, while the scraping, discordant guitar and unsettling drones of "Minor White" flirt with ugliness. "Five Teeth and Crawling" makes nice with a noirish sweep of strings that seems to fall behind the slowly strummed bass and guitar chords, the perfect soundtrack to a silent student film shot on an empty beach.
A few tracks sound decent enough but lack musical substance. "Que Biblia" is a barely-there piece for solo electric piano that, while pretty, seems more like a throwaway film cue than an actual composition. But the damning problem with Felt Cover is not that any one track is particularly terrible, it's that the record as whole just seems, well, bland. Even after a half-dozen listens, I can't play a single track back in my head once the record is over. The best ambient music leaves some kind of aural after-image, flickering bits of texture and mood. Felt Cover, while not at all offensive, simply vanishes.
