Sometimes a blind first listen is best. Pinpoint the parties responsible, post-rave hero Guillermo Scott "Prefuse 73" Herren and drummer Zach "Hella" Hill, and you might expect Ice Capped at Both Ends to be a little more... antic. The latest Prefuse album, this year's Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian, took Herren's cut-and-paste computer editing to a new extreme in density. And Hella have long been a lazy namecheck for critics with a plate full of spazzy 21st century noise-punk unknowns. That pedigree would suggest an album of virtuoso digi-violence, riffs, and drums colliding and crumbling faster than your ears might care to process.
Curiously enjoyable for a few surprised plays, Ice Capped drifts more than it jabs, built on low-impact, quasi-melodic drones and whispery indie rock harmonies. It may open with an agitated wash of cymbals and glitched-out voices, but "pastoral" is the easy-reach adjective that will likely crop up if/when the band is discussed. (Took me a few seconds after the album ended to realize the ambient bird-and-bug hum coming through my open windows wasn't some kind of unlisted outro.) As will the names of certain spectral-sounding, mimsy-voxed acts with zoology-based monikers, some of them also on Warp Records. (Naming names might be a bit cruel.)
Nearly every song sounds like the edge-of-consciousness intro to another, more-uptempo album that never quite kicks in. Given my occasional weakness for the two placid streams that feed this mood music, the stoned synth-slouch of 1990s home-listening post-techno, and is-it-live-in-a-quonset-hut-or-is-it-loft-studio-fuckery? new millennium gently freaky folk-noise, this uniformity was just fine by me. Fair warning, though, if you require more oomph or variety in your full-length records. I could happily avoid real-world responsibilities with the buzzing sitar-ish background texture of "One Second Early Late" for quite some time.
Those who've had enough of keening, multi-tracked harmonies-in-search-of-hooks and glassy more-reverb-than-guitar at a syrup-soaked 16rpm may gripe there's a hell of a lot of this stuff clogging new-release blasts at the moment. If you're burnt out, DWW is perhaps not for you. I do wish more tracks had made use of drums, like the half-speed (and then quartered again) scattered clumps of hip-hop twitches on "Speculative Forensic Investigation". And the gallop of "Epedemic Episodes of Epedemics" is a nice a reminder that art-rock-cum-electronic records can be as "atmospheric" as they like without sacrificing a pulse.
Drowsy but not unpleasantly so, Diamond Watch Wrists' debut will certainly remind clued-in listeners of other contemporary bands capturing a certain rustic ambiance and then electronically zonking it in post-production. But its rhythm-centric moments give it a little extra jolt of personality in 2009's glut of strum-and-hum. The twisted hip-hop iconography of their name may conjure images of last-call revelry, sticky spilt drinks glinting off showpiece jewels under club lighting. But Ice Capped at Both Ends is best enjoyed in the early daytime hours, especially those humid summer mornings when time feels warmly distended, its slurred downtempo mood suiting the pace of the world as it rouses itself, sun washing over the neighborhood.
