No pressure or anything, but if Cale Parks-- the touring drummer for Joan of Arc and the full-time percussionist in Aloha-- ever wants to find crossover success, Polyvinyl needs to look into product-and-positioning plans for Borders listening stations. Both to his credit and fault, Parks' solo debut, Illuminated Manuscript, sounds a lot like this decade's attempt at turning electronic music and 20th-century classical into adult-oriented rock. In 20 years, might Parks be honorary first mate on the Carnival Electronic Music Cruise?
Illuminated Manuscript is the sort of one-man, laptop-and-loop based album that's supposed to compensate for its lack of head with a surplus of heart. But Parks isn't dumb: His comprehension of layers and dynamics is superb, and-- given that Illuminated Manuscript was recorded on borrowed machines while on tour-- he's a skilled engineer. His drum sounds are alternately punchy and graceful, and he has a knack for distending miniature melodies across the space of a song, building big, structured pockets capable of providing comfort almost instantaneously.
But here's the rub: Illuminated Manuscript feels entirely like a record about easy acclimation, a college-sized survey through the past several decades of fringe composition carved into careful and palatable lessons. All the ugliness has been bowdlerized or, at the very least, swept under a rug of pitch-perfect glockenspiels and sequenced synthesizers. The more accessible entries have been highlighted, enumerated as gateways. The controlled static hovering over "Galaxy 8180", for instance, cedes to Parks voice, as though afraid to add something the least bit alienating (or provocative). And the multiple, vamped piano flourishes-- which, lo and behold, manage to dance above and below the key-- get buried beneath everything on "I Am the Arm". Instead of piquing interest, they purport texture.
But, while Parks' sonic recalcitrance makes Styrofoam sound like Merzbow, it's his self-imposed compositional diminution that ultimately makes Illuminated Manuscript so underwhelming. "Late Show" opens with a slow nod to Steve Reich's pulse-driven phases, malleted metals and Farfisa trailing one another in rigid steps. But Parks limits his pulses, adding the last true layer only two minutes in, long before reaching the complexity that Reich used to his advantage. Parks simply preserves the same melodic lines for the second half of the track, using drum rolls and cymbal fans to add simple but saturating textures. Likewise, "Fearsome Opponent"-- a Neu! beat bathed in cheap ethereal tones-- always sounds like it wants to be something bigger than itself, but it only motors onward, all listless, pretty, and innocuous. Illuminated Manuscript is decent as soundtracks for the workday go, but it's utterly forgettable and nice, the sort of docile but erudite record that points to its predecessors without ambitions of eclipsing them.
